Some thoughts on the inhabited universe …

It's not surprising that, in this new Age of Anxiety, UFOs are once again in the news. Back in the 1950s, when I was growing up, our national anxieties about nuclear war, insidious creeping communism and the United States' new role as superpower and global policeman produced many sightings of, even interactions with, UFOs or "flying saucers," as in the age of Fiestaware they were known. The government, the military, the scientists all denied that these phenomena were of extraterrestrial origin, attributing them to weather balloons, the planet Venus, mass hallucination, and "shared delusion" in the case of one couple who claimed to be abducted and who corroborated one another's stories. Discredited, the flying saucer stories gave way to the assassinations, wars and moon shots of the 1960s.

Now the UFOs, or UAPs (unexplained aerial phenomena), are back, with a significant difference: This time the Pentagon is saying that "Something is definitely going on out there." Highly trained, levelheaded pilots in F-18s have observed unidentified objects performing fantastic maneuvers, outmaneuvering and outrunning their own high-tech aircraft. Three possibilities have been advanced: the UAPs are ours (strongly denied by a former assistant secretary of defense), or theirs (i.e., Russia or China, whose technological breakthroughs seem to originate in the garages of Silicon Valley), or not of this world.

Let me add a fourth possibility to this questionable tri-lemma: wish fulfillment. Many of the hopes and fears of the '50s, in fact of the whole horrendous first half of the 20th century, were expressed in the science fiction of that golden age of sci-fi. In my 12th year, in a dark corner of our town's Carnegie library, I discovered the novels and stories of H.G. Wells, Theodore Sturgeon, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Andre Norton, Ursula Le Guin, Alfred Bester. These were the first stories I'd read that didn't feature talking animals and happy endings. They gave a local habitation and a name to the many vague threats and possibilities that lurked on the edges of my small-town life.

Maybe the most appealing characteristic of science fiction was its way of populating the solar system, the Milky Way galaxy and the universe with life — with complex, intelligent life; with alien races both friendly and hostile; with humanoid, even human, races. In these versions of the future composed just before the advent of the Space Age, even the most barren planets harbored and nurtured life.

In a memorable "Tom Corbett" comic book, Mercury is a torrid jungle and space pirate hangout. In countless sci-fi novels, Venus is a swampy, ocean-y world teeming with life: an unfallen paradise in C.S. Lewis' "Perelandra," or a foggy swamp in Heinlein's "Between Planets," inhabited by charming, intelligent dragons. Most accounts of Mars gave the red planet Percival Lowell's canals, feats of titanic engineering that distributed meltwater from the poles across an arid planet and supported races often envious of us Earthlings. George Pal's 1953 movie version of "War of the Worlds" was my favorite all-time movie at age 12; I was rooting for the Martians to win because they had much cooler stuff than did the dorky Earthlings, whom they disintegrated with their skeleton beams.

In Heinlein's "Farmer in the Sky," Jupiter's moon Ganymede is a world being terraformed by Earthlings with mass converters and heat traps, and being farmed by, among others, a teenager named Bill who would have been at home in an episode of "Leave It to Beaver." In "Star Ship on Saddle Mountain," Saturn itself is inhabited by a telepathic humanoid race that sends a scouting expedition to Earth; the scouts abduct a teenage orphan who has seen too much; transport him and his pony, Navajo, to Saturn, and eventually adopt him in a tear-jerker of an ending that touched even my stony seventh-grade heart. In "The Day the Earth Stood Still" (the classic 1951 movie, not the unhappy remake), all the outer planets are inhabited by wise and pacifist and high-tech humanoid aliens who are policed by nonpartisan deadly implacable robots who at the first sign of aggression destroy the aggressor with heat rays and will turn "this Earth of yours" into "a burnt-out cinder" if we don't join the aliens in peace — too cool!

Even the galaxy was inhabited: by humanoid aliens in "Starship through Space," a juvenile sci-fi novel which I probably read 20 times; by human beings in the galactic empire of Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" trilogy; by myriad alien races, some of them hostile, in Heinlein's notorious right-wing classic, "Starship Troopers." And so on.

Besides making for a good story, this populating of the universe assuages our loneliness. As long as we humans have been telling stories, we have envisioned talking animals, Coyote and Raven and Rat, moles in waistcoats, parlors underground. We have seen that our discourse with the natural world is one-sided; that, as C.S. Lewis remarked, Montaigne acted kittenish with his kitten, but she did not talk philosophy with him; that Charles Ives' "Unanswered Question" remains unanswered as Nature passes serenely by. So we imagine animals that talk back to us, and when we begin to explore space, we populate what seems to be an empty cosmos with intelligent alien races with spaceships. The unimaginably vast universe that we find ourselves in is somehow less vast, more comforting for being inhabited, a Thou rather than an it.

Alas, the first planetary flybys did not send back hope for an I and Thou relationship with our nearest neighbors. Mercury is a sun-blasted rock. Venus has a probe-crushing atmosphere, a surface temperature that would melt lead, clouds of sulfuric acid, a most un-Perelandra-like world. The Mariner flybys of Mars revealed a cratered surface similar to our own arid lifeless moon, and an atmosphere too thin for liquid water to exist on the surface. Subsequent Mars missions have shown the red planet to be a more interesting place than the moon, with evidence of flowing water and thus, possibly, of microbial life, a billion or more years ago. Evidence of life on Mars, however microscopic and long-ago, would be evidence that we live in a universe "brimming with life," in Carl Sagan's words; yet microbes are a far cry from a race of canal-digging, heat-ray-shooting super-engineers.

For five-sixths of the history of life on Earth, that brimming life was single-celled, so life in the universe, if our own planet is typical of life-bearing worlds, is likely to be single-celled. When complex life appeared on Earth some 500 million years ago, it was relatively unenlightened, epochs of brutish predation bracketed by episodes of mass extinction. We Homo sapiens appeared only 200,000 years ago, and hunted and gathered until about 12,000 years ago, when we began living in cities and writing things down. A mere 500 years ago we began to acquire a scientific technology; 60 years ago, we began to take the first small, tentative steps away from our planet.

If we set any of these human timelines against the thirteen-and-a-half-thousand-million-year timeline of the universe, they are next to invisible. Even if we imagine an unlikely million-year lifetime for our civilization, the human episode will be one thirteen-thousandth of the lifetime of the universe. What are the chances that our tiny sliver of time will match up with some other intelligent race's sliver, so that we can communicate? As remote as the stars themselves: a radio message, fast enough to travel round the Earth seven times in a single second, would take more than four years to reach our nearest stellar neighbor, Proxima Centauri; 20,000 years to reach the center of our own galaxy; 2.2 million years to reach our next-door neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy. And since light speed is the absolute upper speed limit in this universe, we would seem to be alone.

So it seems likely to the point of certainty that most UFO sightings are the product of our human desire to populate a vast inhuman universe (along with maybe an occasional sighting of a hypersonic Chinese drone). And for those who are feeling lonely, or anxious, or hopeful about our time, I recommend the works of the sci-fi masters, vastly more entertaining than an empty universe.

Michael Nesset lives in North St. Paul.