Invasion

Hrm, I guess I'll take this piece to get on my little soap box about one of the most popular science fiction themes. The idea of an extraterrestrial civilization invading earth seems to be a rather popular one. Personally, I highly doubt there are all that many places which life could have originated in the galaxy, and the possibility of it originating is far from it actually occurring. I assume you are all familiar with the Drake equation, but my assumptions are often wrong, but I'm not going to go over it in detail here. I just have many many doubts that the final number of cases of star traveling civilizations in the entire universe could be very high. It's possible that we're entirely alone, although I doubt that as well... the universe is incomprehensibly vast, and even unlikely events are bound to occur in its nearly endless expanses. However, there is no credible evidence that the Earth has ever been visited by life originating anywhere other than here. But yet, we keep coming up with these complex ideas, we just won't leave them alone. The concept of a race of beings that travels through space and time conquering worlds and moving on is far too intriguing for us to ignore it. But why is it intriguing? I have a theory on this, no actual data, but a just an idea.... perhaps because part of us wants to be like that. It is universally understood by anyone with even an elementary scientific education that it is exceptionally dangerous for our species to be stuck on a single hunk of rock around a star which will eventually burn out or explode, with thousands of other smaller (but still giant) rocks flying around that could jepordize our survivability. This is logical of course... the obvious conclusion being that eventually we're going to need some way to get off the planet if we want to survive as a species. There are many who doubt mankind's ability to do this, but it's amazing what you can accomplish when you spend more than .001% of your resources towards investment in the long term future. Anyway, so assuming we get off the planet, and gain the ability to terraform other planets (don't worry, in many cases this will actually be feasible with deliberate design and distribution of microorganisms engineered to convert various chemical compounds present into things we can use, granted it may take a thousand years to successfully implement it, or more, but a millennium is a drop in the bucket as far as time is concerned.) well then what? We'll probably just keep on expanding, that's one popular theory at least. Once you've gained the ability, why stop, eh? Very well, so we keep on expanding, but what happens if we encounter a planet that by some very unlikely coincidence has developed a form of life on it. What do we do? Our technology is incredible, we can create whatever species we desire (by the looks of it this technology may come before anyone takes space travel seriously again) and here we've encountered life which has developed independently of us. Should we care? Should we leave it alone, should we take samples of it and do experiments on it to identify differences between it ans ourselves which may be useful to us, should we wipe it out entirely and claim the planet as our own? Should we help it out? This last idea seems rather silly, since it could eventually pose a threat to us, but it still needs to be considered. In any case, any action which we would likely take is one of the actions which are commonly portrayed in science fiction. Except in most contemporary science fiction, it's an alien species doing it to us. But that's just the thing, we're only able to think of all these horrible things that could be done to us because we would consider doing them to others, or even to ourselves. The monsters we create are born of our imaginations, because they are inside us, it's who we are, or part of who we are at least.

Anyway, if you had the patience to read that, I hope you enjoyed it. I just like to switch perspectives around a little bit sometimes. ^_^ No, I don't spend much time thinking about this sort of thing, but these are the few conclusions I've reached in the brief time which I have considered them. But alas, now I have better things to do! Huzzah! Off to make more art!


~image made in apophysis