They Came From Above (and They Want Cosmic Love)
Aliens are probably out there, and they’re probably observing us, waiting for us to evolve and get our collective shit together.
The Day the Earth Stood Still (But Only for a Couple Minutes) 🛸
In late April 2020, the Pentagon released three previously leaked videos of unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and yet humanity seemed to just collectively shrug it off like nothing happened.
Sure, it must have inspired countless discussions around the proverbial water cooler — but in the subsequent days, it seemed everyone just went on with their lives, forgetting about the UFOs completely.
The Pentagon coming out to confirm the validity of those videos is no small happenstance. In my opinion, it’s huge. Historic. It opens up so many pocket universes of possibilities about whether or not aliens are really out there, and sparks endless debates about what all this means for us.
Let’s face it: aliens are probably out there, and they’re probably observing us, waiting for us to evolve and get our collective shit together.
If I was an advanced alien civilization, I would either not bother with humanity and its big blue planet, or, alternatively, I might act as some kind of benevolent force operating from a distance, observing and guiding humanity’s evolution, possibly even facilitating course-corrections whenever necessary.
As an advanced alien civilization, I too would only make my presence known by hovering my spaceship just far enough away from a potato quality camera with one too few megapixels, wait for a few seconds, and then fly off into the ether.
Cosmic Love, Hollywood, and Stuff 👽✨
Okay, so maybe this is my Piscean idealism talking, but the idea of a benevolent alien species watching over us warms me to the core, and it helps me sleep better at night.
It’s a testament to the idea that as civilizations advance, they set aside their differences and support each other — as well as acting as stewards of sorts for all forms of life within their sphere of influence. Not a guarantee, of course. But an ideal to strive towards.
Humanity as a whole — still not having completely shed some of its more (ahem) primal and tribalistic tendencies — will have a really difficult time accepting that a “new” intelligent species has shown up on its doorstep and wants to be allies, maybe even friends?
This is probably why aliens have thus far chosen to keep their distance.
According to the Kardashev scale (developed by astronomer Nikolai Kardashev), our advancement is directly tied to how much energy we can use given our technology. A Type I civilization (AKA a “Planetary civilization”) uses all the energy available on the planet. A Type II civilization (AKA a “Stellar civilization”) can harness all the energy from its host star. Wild, right? According to theoretical physicist Michio Kaku, if all goes well, Earth should reach Type I status within the next 100-200 years. (So let’s keep this planet healthy and beat this pandemic already.)
I’d like to also note here that the Kardashev scale gives us no information about an advanced civilization’s culture, customs, and practices. So trying to predict how an advanced civilization of unknown origin will behave towards us humans is a total crapshoot as far as I’m concerned.
But hey, let’s speculate anyway.
Again, maybe I’m just a hopeless romantic, but I like to think that highly advanced civilizations practice cosmic love: in our case, it’s the philosophy that we are all part of the same giant superorganism that is the cosmos— and though we are physically separate from the planet, we are inextricably interdependent with it.
Aliens who are highly advanced (type 2 and up, let’s say) might also be highly “enlightened” beings (whatever that means) and understand that we are all one, in the vein of the teachings of Buddha and purported alien Ra (see: The Law of One, if you’re unfamiliar).
Therefore, there is a chance that type 2 civilization aliens (or at the very least one group of them) are benevolent beings that have humanity’s best interests at heart — either taking a laissez-faire approach and letting us evolve on our own, or actively guiding or helping our evolution in some way à la Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar.
Hollywood has had wide-ranging portrayals of aliens, but I’ve most often found the benevolent portrayals to be the most compelling. For the last time, it might just be the idealistic INFP in me. I don’t know.
Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival is my favorite alien encounter portrayal to ever come out of Hollywood. Thus far. The film is based on a short story called “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang.
Without spoiling too much, the story, at its core, is about love, particularly the love between mother and child — but it’s also about cosmic love! The “weapon” was actually a gift, a show of good faith between two very different species.
Now, don’t get me wrong: my idealism doesn’t blind me to the fact that morality is complex and that if good and evil exist within the hearts of all of humanity, so must the same be true for alien species, even if they present themselves as benevolent initially.
Following this interstellar train of thought, a “big sibling” civilization may even protect us from those barbaric type 0 and type 1 civilization aliens who may wish to do us harm. But who knows.
The deeper I dig into these intellectual rabbit holes and play out these thought experiments, the more I realize there is no way to be certain that a highly advanced alien civilization would ever have our backs. But I still hold onto the hippie notion that love is the answer. And so is 42.
As I stated above, the way I see it, it’s plausible that enlightened aliens have existed long before us and already know of our existence. And they are just waiting for us to catch up, evolve, thrive as a species, collectively growing and opening our hearts, realizing that the answer is love.
