For thousands of years, humanity has held certain truths to be self-evident. The belief that all that we are is not all that we could be; how else to explain the inexorable rise of civilisation after civilisation over the millennia? The belief that the knowledge which we have accumulated is not all the knowledge that is available to us in a universe which we hold to be infinite. The belief that we are, at root, a social species; at our happiest and most content when we band together in communities and that the occasional deviations from this norm are just simply minor aberrations in extremely small numbers of individuals. The belief that we are not alone in the infinite expanses of time and space despite our complete absence of certain knowledge that this is indeed the case; we have no better estimation of our lack of uniqueness as sentient beings than mere statistics and probabilities, though of the same kind of probabilities which underpin our most coherent and complete theory, however imperfect, about how the universe functions.
That sense of being unique and yet, in some way, not unique fuels the most basic and fundamental stories about ourselves; our creation myths. The place whence we came which is not our parents; our true origins. Throughout recorded history, and surely beyond; humanity has held the firm conviction that something cannot spring from nothing, even quantum mechanics must invoke the virtual particles of 'quantum foam' to escape from the paradox to best all paradoxes; how the uncertainty inherent in the very fabric of the universe allows 'loans' to be taken out providing they are all repaid on the due date. (I have yet to hear a convincing explanation which deals with the unlikely event of the universe defaulting on its obligations and it may, at best, be a pointless speculation.)
It is surely this belief that we are 'not alone' that provides the kindling for the fire of the 'spirits of the ancestors'; the immortal souls of a hundred religions, the cycle of life, death and subsequent rebirth; the ghosts of headless horseman and every kind of nymph, satyr, God and gods; that we surely cannot be the only beings able to talk, or think, or write in the entire expanse of the cosmos. We are apt to dismiss each manifestation of our lack of 'aloneless' with calls to logic and rational or scientific thought and yet it is our rational minds that bring us to the paradoxical conclusion that we are not alone.
We dismiss the shaman's dialogue with the spirits as an overuse of such narcotics as peyote or mescaline; the divine soul as an inability to properly phrase the question of mind/body duality; ghosts, a trick of the light or a misfiring in the visual cortex; nymphs, satyrs, centaurs and their ilk are merely consigned to imaginative fiction writers, no less well versed than existing writers of fantasy; God or a pantheon of gods are rejected for their all too obvious and very human traits, which we feel deep down, instinctively, to be somehow unworthy of a divine figurehead, or figureheads, responsible for the whole of creation..
In recent years, over the past half-century or so, extra-terrestrials have entered the mix as a preferred choice for those that seek the divine in the 'other'. Whilst there can be no doubt that the rise in UFO sightings and alien abductions have increased exponentially since the second world war and garnered much from the achievements of the space race during the 1960s and the growth of cosmology and astrophysics in the last two or three decades, there can surely be no conjecture that this is not simply a manifestation of exactly the same type of belief which encouraged ancestor worship.
There are, I think, few of a rational or scientific bent, that will seek to deny with any conviction that ET is, or has been, most likely out there somewhere. There are so many stars, and therefore potential planets, out there and then so many galaxies of stars that the belief that we could be the only star in hundreds of billions of stars that might support life to actually do so, defies credibility. The real question is not whether ET is 'out there', we can almost take that for a given, but whether we can communicate with him, or her, or it. For, if we cannot communicate, we are still 'alone' for all intents and purposes. And unless some new physics comes along where the speed of light is no longer an absolute barrier, the prospects of communicating with ET are very remote, almost infinitesimal; unless humanity is prepared to wait 1,000,000 years or so for the response to 'How are you hanging, dude?'
When all is said and done (which it isn't, not by a long way, cherub), humanity really ought to get used to being alone; there is no 'other' out there with which we could, or ought, to communicate. We are on our own and the sooner we accept that fact, the better we will get along with each other.
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