Max Ernst, Eye of Silence
Aliens don't exist. Or do they?
The SETI Institute (founded in 1984) has spent almost 3o years searching for signs of extrterrestrial intelligence. Despite being endorsed by such luminaries as Carl Sagan, the search, so far, has been futile.
http://www.seti.org/about-us
Millions of people report seeing UFOs every year. Some report talking to, or even being abducted by, aliens. No credible evidence exists of this being anything but mass hysteria.
The famous Fermi paradox is still as pertinent as ever. The paradox, proposed by the physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950, basically asks, "Where are they?". Considering a large number of potentially habitable planets in our galaxy and the age of the universe, we should be awash in alien visitors. Clearly, we are not.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
And yet, popular culture and popular science alike are obsessed with aliens. A superficial glance at the history of Hollywood shows the perennial appeal of the idea of alien contact: "The War of the Worlds" (1953, 2005), "Alien" (1979) and all its sequels, "E.T." (1982) , "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" (1977), "Avatar" (2009) etc, etc. Science fiction's most enduring masterpieces: H. G. Wells' "The War of the Worlds" (1896), The Strugatski brothers' "Roadside Picnic"(1977), Stanislaw Lem's "Solaris" (1961) and "Fiasco" (1986), evoke the magic of meeting creatures who are intelligent like ourselves, and yet in some profound sense, very different from us.
This blog will be about this magic. Not about the question of whether aliens actually exist but about the burning desire to know that they do. What is behind this desire? Why has our culture become so fascinated with such a huge hypothetical? What is missing in us that we hope to find in the Other?
Teaching a course on science fiction and writing a book about the ethics and aesthetics of alien encounters, I want to share my thoughts on these subjects. This is a work in progress. Hopefully it will be completed before the actual aliens show up and make it all redundant.
