Somewhere out there...

The theme of the day yesterday seemed to, for some reason, be aliens. Now, a lot of the the people that I read or heard about yesterday would take that as a sign of some sort. I'm not really going to have that problem. With all of the kooky things I believe with regards to space and time and energy and blobbity blah, I don't think we will ever make contact with any sort of "intelligent life".

It all started in the morning when I was looking at the Twitter of a right wingnut that had once attacked me for calling Rush Limbaugh an idiot. I needed some morning amusement. What I got was funnier than anything ever. He had made a comment about aliens and how he thought they probably existed. He then went on to wonder why no one had ever thought to look for them somewhere on the "other side of the sun". With all the shocking poll results lately revealing that a startling number of Republicans don't know that Hawaii is in the US or that Medicare is government run, I guess this shouldn't come as too great a shock. Or maybe I'm the stupid one here. Maybe I am completely missing some other meaning that could have. But as far as I know, we are spinning along with 7ish other planets around the sun. I really wish I could ask him to draw me a picture of space so I could see what he thinks is going on there.

I later checked out a few articles on Digg about space exploration, focusing specifically on the existence of "intelligent life" in space. I then happened upon something called the "Camelot Project". I encourage you to check out their web site if you get as tickled as I do when reading conspiracy theories. This one is a real doozy, too. Its got aliens in ancient times, time travellers here now trying to help us avoid getting on the wrong "timeline" and quite a few people who recieve visions about the future. It never ends either. I'd had too much when I got to the part about radio towers in Switzerland controlling people's moods.

Personally, I'd rather be a crazy conspiracy theorist. At least they have a little imagination and smarts. You can't come up with all that stuff without at least a good amount of knowledge. Otherwise you'll just be prattling on about the other side of the sun.

Then when I got home, I put on Primetime to listen to while I did a little recreational painting. Coincidentally enough, it was about people who thought they'd been abducted by aliens. Turns out its really just a condition called "Sleep Paralysis", where one wakes and is paralyzed and then sees stuff, namely little green men coming to get them. Not helping these people is good ole Dr. Sprinkle. He does hypnotic regression to help people "remember" their abductions. I'm making him sound as villainous as possible but in reality, he's just a sad old man who seems to have gotten pretty confused about the whole real life versus fantasy mess. There is one guy in particular, Stan, who claims to have photos of the aliens who visit him. They're pretty hilariously unconvincing. The sad thing is, his wife supports him fully and they have children. Now, I have to say, it has to be pretty obviously not the truth for me to be calling bullshit on it. I'd usually say that maybe he is telling the truth and we don't know for sure. But this guy? Yeah. We know for sure. I think he really believes it, though, and his wife's gotta be Queen Enabler.

So what do I think about aliens? Never going to happen. From what I understand about space and space travel, there is no way for us to ever find alien beings through space travel. We don't have the technology to travel far enough or fast enough to go anyplace we don't know about. Everyplace we do know about is void of life. Another issue is time. Time is so funky to think about that it makes my brain feel like imploding, but we humans have not been here long, in the grand scheme of things. So, if I understand correctly, a being traveling from somewhere outside our solar system would either have to have some pretty impressive machinery or they might not make it here before we're gone. They'd definitely have to have technology far, far more advanced than we do.

Now, simply communicating in a "Hey, is anybody out there?" "Yeah, we're out here." manner is much more possibly possible, but I also think this is never gonna happen. Who knows what could be out there? We don't even understand our own planet, really. I don't have enough knowledge to come up with a good example of what exactly I mean. What I'm trying to say is--we are looking for life on our terms. I think our very existence is such an amazing chance and perhaps there isn't anything remotely like us out there. Probably there isn't. But what can't we see? What can't we understand? Perhaps a better understanding of ourselves and our planet is the key to understanding our universe. I tend to feel that space travel is a waste of tax dollars that could be spent on figuring out things about the ocean, about ourselves, about our brains! Like, we don't know what dreams are! Every night we all have them, we don't know what they are, and there we are up walking around on the moon. The ocean is a mystery, and here we are spending millions checking out Mars.

Maybe someday we'll understand our world. Maybe someday we'll understand the universe. But until then, we are left with Stan and Dr. Sprinkle and the majority of Americans thinking there is definitely life out there, somewhere. And maybe, thanks to our fantastic school system and Rush Limbaugh, someday someone will go check on the other side of the sun.