We Are Not Not Alone

Note: It has been said, and I think truly, that every human being is a philosopher. That is, we all fashion explanations and reasons to smooth our ways through life. Most of these explanations and reasons are pretty shoddy patched up jobs — but people know what they need to believe to get from sunrise to sunrise. Here is my philosophy, which I don’t offer as being better than anyone else’s.

” Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie”, wrote Blaise Pascal, thereby qualifying as a modern. “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.”

And our world, with its Beethoven and Shakespeare and Buddy Holly and the Keystone Cops and all its incredible outpouring of the incidental — is all staggeringly improbable. The difference between this degree of improbability and impossibility is small enough to be regarded as non-existent.

We and our world are impossible. And yet we exist — and we exist alone because the almost infinite improbability of our existing effectly rules out other such beings as us.

Immensely powerful telescopes sweep the skies listening for patterns in the buzz of electromagnetic radiation that would appear to have been imposed on the radiation by intelligent beings in order to carry messages from one place to another. The telescopes have detected nothing of the sort — only random noise.

This does not mean that there is no intelligent life out there — only that there is no sign of intelligent life having imposed patterns on electromagnetic radiation for some purpose or other.

We ask ourselves, if intelligent life happened here, why couldn’t it have happened elsewhere? The answer must be that the chances pf a world coming into being in which one intelligent being composes The Marriage of Figaro to create something called pleasure in other intelligent beings, is so crushingly freakishly small that we are justified in saying that there is no chance at all.

We are alone. We must accordlingly regard ourselves with awe — if indeed our freakish being can ever know what “must” means. Whatever it means, we are the ones who created the meaning.

Le silemce eternel des espaces infinie . . .

So what do we make of our aloneness? I’s better not to think about it. Another Frenchman said “Il faut cultiver son jardin.” One must tend to one’s garden. Those two saying are the bookends that embrace all our wisdom.

Note: This post is intentionally left in a jumbled first draft state because it is best to asknowledge one’s disarray when confronting these questions.