Extraterrestrial Intelligence

DISCLAIMER: Apologies in advance if this article sounds tone deaf in such perilous times. For my part I am experiencing suffering and death in my family (albeit not related to the novelcoronavirus) so please believe that I do take this seriously. Hope everyone is keeping safe.

ACTUAL ARTICLE
If you are reading this you then exist. There are philosophical arguments that demand rejection of such an inflexible thought, but such arguments are lost on me. If you don’t exist please feel free to go back to whatever it was you weren’t doing. At the very least, thinking that you exist is more than enough to pass for existence, so congratulations. Agreeing on our existence is reassuring. It is fun that we are all at the same party. Within our collective existences we perform the various motions of life and of death. We might look into each others eyes, we might dissemble, we might pick ourselves up off the floor. All of the things that we find ourselves doing will fill our days with streams of flowing dreams that shift, twist, and, eventually, disappear. So far so good.

The next stop on the train, for most of us, is usually meaning. All this existing is happening but so what? Why are we sitting here? Do we really disappear? What are we supposed to do? Every part of what we experience asks the same questions but the answers, if they manifest at all, usually feel unsatisfactory. So what must we do? We might strive to merge into the divine, we might serve our self interest, we might hang around and wait for a sign. Maybe all of those at once. It is a life’s work to find peace and purpose with the varied existences we all share. It’s nice work if you can get it.

So here are my thoughts for what they are worth. Since we are all in the same improbable situation asking ourselves the same impossible questions we have absolutely nothing to loose by creating our own answers. We are here because we want to be here, or we need to be. We appear, disappear, maybe reappear with our own meanings and if we can bring even a little bit of kindness to that, then we can move through time with style and purpose. We own making that happen. The details of our lives reflect the same signals we can hear across the vast expanse of space. If we point our antennae towards the ends of the universe we can hear it tell us everything we know is right.