Transcension

The Transcension Hypothesis is a little-discussed theory posed by futurist John Smart in order to explain the phenomenon known as the Fermi Paradox. For those unfamiliar with the Fermi Paradox, it is scientists’ way of asking, “why are we so alone?” It addresses the paradox born of the fact that the universe is full of innumerable stars surrounded by even more planets and yet we have only discovered life on one so far: our own. If the universe is so vast, even if life is rare, why haven’t we been introduced yet?

There are many possible answers to the paradox and I will state my meaningless opinion on it in a moment, but I first wanted to introduce the transcension hypothesis to all of you who stay awake at night wondering when you’ll finally be abducted by aliens, because it will certainly be keeping me awake for some time pondering this theory.

The transcension hypothesis offers up and unique explanation for why we haven’t made contact with extraterrestrial life: aliens are introverts.

Alright, it’s far from that simple (unfortunately). The basic premise states that as aliens become sufficiently advance they begin to explore ever more inward, rather than outward. We as humans are and have always been explorers and are constantly casting our nets further and further away to see what we catch, but it could be possible that, as technology advances at an exponential rate, we will no longer have to look outside of ourselves for answers, or really, for anything at all.

Virtual worlds, virtual reality, and augmented reality are already a part of our lexicon. They are still in their infancy, but the next decade promises to bring significant advancements in the field. Before long, we may be able to explore the stars in our own homes. The desire to set out and discover may be quenched by technology’s ability to accurately mimic the experience. At some point, actual corporal existence itself may become obsolete as we get so good at simulating the real world that our floating brains in jars will no longer be able to tell the difference. And if technology continues to advance exponentially, the experience will only get deeper, more real with time as a civilization advances.

We like to imagine advancement leading to outward expansion, as this is what we have done for the entirety of our very short existence, but this hypothesis asks us to consider the idea that technology will reach a tipping point wherein we can expand out no further and instead collapse forever inward, so deeply into ourselves that nothing, not even light can escape. We may become a species sized black hole of our own making.

If this is probable, or even possible, perhaps it has already happened. Perhaps an advanced civilization far ahead of us, one we would expect to be roaming the stars is actually exploring the innermost recesses of consciousness, unseen, in a void so complete they can no longer be found. Perhaps advance races transcend the notion of outward expansion along with physical form long before they reach the stars. We’re looking for the meaning of life, the universe, and everything (42) out there when perhaps others have already found it in their own selves. The mind is a powerful thing, perhaps the most powerful in the universe.

But even if this is possible, that doesn’t mean that all advanced civilizations will go this route. There could still be those who never shook off their juvenile wanderlust. Which brings me to my personal opinion on the Fermi Paradox. I subscribe to a combination of two other, rather more popular hypotheses, The Great Filter and the Rare Earth Hypothesis. There is a lot to talk about here, and perhaps I will at a later time, but in short the Great Filter is just that, a filter for advanced life; it is the “you shall not pass” sign on advancement. Essentially, any sufficiently advanced race will destroy itself before it can become interstellar. Or perhaps the filter is further back. The Rare Earth hypothesis states that life in the universe is common, but advanced life capable of building space probes, questioning their existence, and maintaining blogs are exceedingly rare. Life rarely gets to this point and only a very specific and very lucky set of circumstances has allowed us the ability to write blogs.

I’m waiting for the Mars 2020 mission, hoping like many others we will finally find proof of life, either living or past, on Mars, because this would lend credence to my current worldview (or universe-view). Basic, simple life could be abundant throughout the universe; it could exist everywhere it is possible for it to exist. But complex, multicellular, philosophizing human-like creatures are a statistical anomaly. One that, in the sheer vastness of space, was bound to happen at least once or twice. Consciousness is, after all, the way the universe observes itself. Perhaps that one other civilization in the universe is just too busy with their VR goggles to notice us.

Or maybe I’m totally wrong and the aliens will finally come just to spite me. If any alien civilizations out there are reading this, please feel free to prove me wrong. Please.

Gears

If you’re playing really fast and loose with the semantics, it can be argued that a device created somewhere around 100 BC, discovered in 1901, is one of the first computers. Known as the Antikythera Mechanism, the device was found on an ancient shipwreck and after decades of analysis, those studying it can conclude that the device was used to calculate various astronomical measurements and have even made replicas of what the device may have looked like and how it functioned.

Now I’d like to play the “what if” game. The technology and calculations behind the Antikythera Mechanism were probably lost during antiquity. When it was first discovered, scientists didn’t even know what they were looking at, and it took x-ray scanning technology to fully unwrap its mysteries. The mechanism was likely fourteen-hundred years ahead of its time, as technologies of similar complexity did not appear until the fourteenth century. What if it hadn’t been lost?

Fourteen-hundred years is a long time, and progress is anything but linear. We experience great bursts of technological and socio-political development that last for decades followed periods of darkness, but it makes me wonder sometimes, just how great was this setback?

When we look back at antiquity we are met with people who believed in democracy, who invented mathematic equations, who looked up at the stars and built computers to track them. If we showed them all we have now, they may recognize themselves in it. Pluck someone out of the dark ages and they’d scream magic up until their head explodes. I’m generalizing here, but there was an obvious trend upwards, towards discovery, toward the stars, but somewhere along the way, it was lost along with the Antikythera Mechanism.

Where would we be today had we held onto it? And I don’t mean the mechanism, I mean the attitude of discovery that created it? Would we have made more and more complex computers to map out the sky? Would we have invented telescopes a thousand years further back to see deeper into the void? Would we be a millennium ahead of where we are now? Antikythera mechanism II

History is weird like that. History is not a science, and it moves in stops and starts. There’s no way to predict how fast which part will move. Each gear moves at its own pace. Politics, human rights, technology, they each have their own gear and their speed is unpredictable. Sometimes they even turn around and move backward. Unfortunately, we don’t have a machine to calculate these things for us like the Greeks made. There is no mechanism to predict how history will go. But since antiquity, perhaps since before history, it trends toward up, closer to the stars even as the gears tick on in random patterns. That, at least, hasn’t changed much.

Separation Anxiety

There is something extra intriguing to me about very old science fiction. Late 19th century, early 20th-century science fiction, before science fiction was actually a genre, is a strange place to be. It’s something about the fact that we were imagining things we can’t imagine having imagined at the time. I imagine. Things like beings like us living on another world. The fact that alien invasion has been on our mind for over a century or more, aliens in their alien machines, aliens more advanced than us. Robots, apocalypses, and dystopias are not modern inventions and it’s weird to wrap my head around. War of the Worlds

It’s as weird to me as looking at very old photographs of things and people so old that their grandchildren are already dead. It gives you a glimpse far back enough that you can’t relate to it anymore; it’s far enough removed in time that it might as well be a different world. If time were space it’d be lightyears away. Science fiction from long ago has the same effect for me. It’s coming from a place so removed that it’s almost unrecognizable, and yet, many of the motifs are very much the same. It gives credence to the saying, “people are alike all over,” or perhaps, people are alike all the time.

It makes me think aliens are maybe a universal concept. We’ve wanted them to exists for as long as we’ve known that they could. Maybe longer. Possibly forever. Maybe humans can’t help but look at the sky and expect beings we can barely understand to live there. As a whole species, our necks are craned up and held there, but why? Is it because we feel so alone and insignificant that we long for more? Or is it because it’s just a sentient being’s tendency to assume there are others? Perhaps we aren’t meant to be alone. Le Voyage Dans La Lune

We don’t like being left alone, nervously looking up at the sky, waiting, like separation anxiety. We have guns we think, hey, we can shoot ourselves to the moon and maybe they’ll be people there. We go to Mars with a shovel and think, hey, maybe there will be life in there. We get ready to send our sailboats to the stars and think hey maybe we’ll run into someone along the way. We’re getting so antsy the longer we’re alone. We’ve been writing stories about going to the stars, about the stars coming to us forever. We’ve put it on paper, on screen, everywhere we can, offering up a new possibility of sentient life somewhere other than here like we have to.

So maybe it’s just a human thing, so deep rooting we don’t remember planting it. Maybe science fiction is as old as loneliness itself. If we can just get around this bend in that river of stars maybe, just maybe, we’ll finally find we aren’t so alone.

Netflix, I beg of you…

I’ve heard tell that Netflix is planning to make a live-action remake of the much-beloved anime classic Cowboy Bebop. I’m also aware that they made the much-hated, much racist, much-missed-the-entire-point live-action remake of another anime classic, Death Note.

Cowboy Bebop is my favorite anime. Period. When people ask, that’s what I give them. I can go on about all the other anime I love, but Bebop holds the top spot in my weeb heart. So please, Netflix, I beg of you, don’t mess this one up.

The truth is this: all you have to do is maintain what the anime does to perfection. Though every anime is different and has its own distinct flavor, anime is still very much a style, and filmmakers have managed to emulate this style in live action before (think Kill Bill and The Matrix). It is the superfluous zoom-ins, the impractical latex/leather attire, the stylish action, the flips, the fanfare, the backgrounds, the mood that makes anime what it is. The atmosphere that Bebop creates is enormous, its heavy; it must be captured or what, really, is the point?

At the moment I don’t have much faith in Netflix. They’ve given me no reason to believe that they are up to the task of adapting one of the most important animes ever made, but I will remain hopeful (I have to, or I’ll probably just cry).

See You Space Cowboy

Ghost Hands

As of this writing, the Voyager 1 craft is currently the furthest manmade object from Earth. To put this in perspective, I think of the fact that Voyager 1 is an object that human hands have touched and that it has taken that touch out further than anything before. The ghost-hands that once worked on the probe are now approximately 13 billion miles (145 astronomical units) away from their living counterparts. You could say human’s physical presence extends this far, beyond our Solar System now, and every second that goes by, the little probe gets further and further away and may continue to do so forever, or until aliens pick it up.

Now, I probably think about Voyager 1 a lot more often than the average person, but it’s the aliens part I’ve been thinking about recently, as have many across the nation thanks to the headlines about the possibility that our recent extraterrestrial visitor is actually an alien probe.

Briefly, the space object known as Oumuamua dropped by the solar system a few months back and, based on its trajectory, it is considered to be the first object to enter the Solar System from beyond. More recently, two Harvard scientist wrote a paper outlining how the admittedly oddly shaped space rock could actually be a defunct (or even functional) alien probe. They were not claiming that it is aliens, just that the math says it could be.

Naturally, journalists for major news outlets got out their aluminum-lined money hats and wrote hyperbolic headlines with the words “Harvard Physicists” and “Aliens” in the same title in the hopes of drawing in the masses. It worked and there’s a quiet buzz in the shape of the “aliens” meme going around.

But the possibility that Oumuamua is (but probably isn’t) aliens did get me thinking about Voyager 1. And Star Trek. Both of which I do a lot. It got me thinking: what if Oumuamua is an alien Voyager 1. A very old, outdated, broken space craft that is miles and centuries away from the appendages that once touched it. Not some sort of messenger or explorer by trade, simply a craft who has carried the ghosts-hands of a faraway, possibly long dead species far beyond its solar system and into ours. Perhaps it was just passing through. It will go on, pass through other solar systems, maybe it already has, carrying ghosts of countless others. Maybe Voyager 1 will tumble into the solar system Oumuamua came from. Maybe our ghost-hands will meet theirs someday, shake hands, and continue on.

Maybe that idea lessens the sense of existential dread I feel when I think of how big the universe really is. The idea of hands crisscrossing the universe, end over end, over and over each other like a big, universal group hug.

When Eddie Met Space Parasite

I’m biased towards Venom as a character. I went into the 2018 film biased. Spider-Man is my favorite superhero, and I’d seen Spider-Man The Animated Series all the way through enough times to know that a) the Venom arch is my favorite and b) Sam Rami’s Spider-Man 3 can rot in that special place in hell reserved for The Last Airbender and all the other Hollywood movies that maimed beloved parts of my childhood. So I avoided all trailers save for the first, all spoiler talk, all interviews in the hopes of going in with as clean a mind as possible. And I came out a happy Venom fan.

That is until I hopped on the internet when I got home and discovered that the critics and even lots of casual viewers didn’t like the film. I read through the reviews and sighed because I realized, as is want to happen, oh no, all these poor people have entirely missed the point. How sad.

All these people went into Venom and saw an entirely different film than I did, and the one I saw was much, much better. Many people, I realized, thankfully saw the same film I did hence the polarizing reception. Many loved it, many hated it. But how can so many people have gone into one movie and see two very different films?

Simple. Scores of people didn’t realize they had just witnessed the romantic comedy 2018 didn’t know it needed and not some dumb action movie. Because a dumb action movie it is if you look at it that way. But put on your romcom glasses people, and you’ve got a good one here. Symbrock

Whether or not the filmmakers intended to make the romantic comedy is irrelevant, what’s done is done. You cannot convince me that the story of a likable and well-meaning, but hapless loser who is forced to serve as the host to a sassy alien symbiote who uses his sass to cover up his own insecurities and who ultimately decides to abandon his own race in order to stay with his human is not a romantic comedy, because you’re wrong. And I’m not even saying the filmmakers didn’t intend this either, I’m just saying it wouldn’t matter. Because if I don’t have to make up the fact that Eddie Brock and Venom kissed then somebody is doing the Lord’s work and they know it.

The playful banter between Eddie and his space parasite boyfriend abounds. In fact, it is the focus of the film. Perhaps owing to the fact that Spider-Man couldn’t be present in the film because Sony, MCU blah, blah, blah, the focus becomes Meatsuit and Venom’s odd, yet endearing relationship. The fact that I just described their relationship as “endearing” should be proof enough.

Eddie is a screw-up, Venom, in his own words, is kind of a loser amongst his peers, a loner; they click. They save each other, they grow to understand and even need each other. Eddie becomes comfortable being “us,” cohabiting his own body, his identity changing to accommodate his new life partner. The implications are deep, something the comics explore more in-depth if that interests you; the comics also feature Eddie and Venom referring to each other as “dear” and “my love” and eventually having a child together. Please do with that information what you will.

But I’m not here to stray too far from the scope of the film, a film whose aims I can’t say I’m certain of, but I am certain of what it delivered: rom-com gold. If you didn’t like the film, watch it again in this context. Watch it solely for the amusing and often heartfelt development of Eddie and Devil-Flubber’s relationship. Ignore all the bad action movie parts. They don’t need to be there. Give them a sitcom, because that’s actually what we’re here for.

October 24th, 1946

The first photograph taken from space was a view of the Earth, snapped in black-and-white on October 24th, 1946 at an altitude of 65 miles with the aide of a V-2 rocket, the kind that killed lots of people.

The photo itself is grainy and wasn’t taken high enough to truly capture the earth’s curvature. You can infer the presence of huge clouds and their shadows (if you squint).

October 24th, 1946 I had a visceral reaction when I first stumbled upon the picture, in itself may be unremarkable, in its existence may be, not to be too dramatic, one of the most revolutionary pictures ever taken. I thought up Neil Armstrong’s words: “One small step for a man. One giant leap for mankind.” (I’m choosing to assume here that Armstrong actually did utter the word “a,” as many analysts posit, as I’m not here to get into the discussion about the redundancy of one of the world’s most famous phrases without the inclusion of the indefinite article. At the moment…)

This is one grainy picture, but it marks the first time in billions of years that the planet earth has been able to look down and observe itself from above. Nothing conscious had ever, with its own eyes, seen the planet we live on. By this time we’d seen all the other planets in our solar system, but never our own. The photo gives me this almost unexplainable feeling of brain-hurting discomfort (in a good way?), the same kind I get from Schrodinger’s Cat and the tree that fell in the forest with no one around the hear it. Because we’re here, on the earth, every single day, but, like, no one’s ever actually seen it before? And everything and everyone that came before us never saw it before either. It took until 1946, after the invention of the telephone and movies and V-2 rockets that kill people in droves before we could actually see ourselves.

This grainy picture may contain millions of people, with millions more just off the edge, and they are all so reduced by this image that it makes me a bit sick thinking about the fact that no one had yet experienced this level of sublimity before.

Now we can see pictures of the earth all the time. In great detail, in color, in its full grandeur, but nothing really hits me like this first one. The first time we no longer had to look up at the stars, but down at ourselves. Or else I’m just being really dramatic.