Hope, fear and a universe full of Luke Skywalkers

By Soncirey Mitchell
Reader Staff

This July, the House Oversight Committee’s national security subcommittee heard testimony from multiple military officials alleging the existence of alien life — and, confirming the long-held suspicions of many, that the U.S. government has known about these “biologics” visiting Earth since the 1930s.

The news was met with bored acceptance.

Whether or not aliens have visited Earth, the idea of extraterrestrials permeates our culture so thoroughly that they have become a means to process our deepest fears and issues.

Humanity’s obsession with aliens dates back at least to the second century C.E. Syrian author Lucian of Samosata wrote the satirical work A True Story — sometimes translated as True History — which details an encounter with the peoples of the moon and the sun, called Hippogypians and Hippomyrmicks, respectively. 

In his tongue-in-cheek account, the two civilizations are at war over the right to colonize the Morning Star — an apropos topic for an author living in the Roman Empire.

The iconic poster that hung in Fox Mulder’s office in The X-Files. Courtesy image.

The aliens are differentiated from humanity by their bean hull helmets, their breastplates made of lupines and the enormous vultures with lettuce for feathers that they ride into battle. Despite the fanciful descriptions, these aliens provided a means for Lucian to process the major political events of his time without explicitly having to write about them.

Later science fiction built upon this concept by dehumanizing aliens, allowing the fictitious works to mirror humanity’s greatest flaws while distancing us from the blows of the implicit critiques.

The octopus-like Martians in H.G. Wells’ 1898 novel War of the Worlds may sound far from Lucian’s bean-clad men in appearance, but the anxiety they represent is quite similar. Like the British Empire under which Wells lived, his Martians colonize Earth in an attempt to consume its resources and destroy the indigenous inhabitants — in this case, humans.

The fictional image of alien imperialism hit so close to home that a 1938 radio drama of the story — narrated by Orson Welles — sent U.S. listeners into hysterics as they mistook the show for actual news.

It does take a certain amount of narcissism to imagine that alien villains look like beasts while alien heroes look like humans. Luke Skywalker is no more from Earth as the xenomorphs in Alien, but there’s no question as to which of them will save the galaxy.

Prolific author Orson Scott Card plays with this idea in Ender’s Game, in which a war between humans and insectoid aliens isn’t as morally black-and-white as it appears. Ender’s Game is the evolution of the previous trope used by Wells: Instead of transposing humanity’s flaws onto an inhuman creature, Card invites readers to question their own fallibility. What makes a being monstrous: their fangs or their actions?

Our narcissism is watered down with a dash of hope. No other science fiction is as optimistic as Star Trek; with its utopian future depicting a universe full of humanoid beings who are differentiated only by their ears or spots or lumpy heads. Instead of lamenting its tight budget, the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Chase” gave an in-universe explanation for this genetic similarity: Billions of years prior, the only humanoid race in the galaxy seeded hundreds of planets with their DNA to create more beings like themselves. Encoded in that DNA were pieces of a treasure map, so that if all the planets worked together in peace, they could find their way back to the homeworld. The aliens looked out across a strange universe and had one single motivating thought: They didn’t want to be alone.

When humanity imagines other lifeforms that look exactly like us, it may well be conceited, but it is also a kind of plea. Please be like us. We’re afraid that we’re alone.

It’s the same wish heard in 55 languages on the Voyager 1 probe’s Golden Records. Humanity may be divided, but on those recordings, greetings and invitations from the world’s cultures can be heard one after another in perfect harmony.

“Hope everyone’s well. We are thinking about you all. Please come here to visit when you have time,” is spoken in Mandarin Chinese.

“Welcome home. It is a pleasure to receive you,” a voice says in Punjabi.

Forty years later, the recent congressional hearings have revealed the possibility of other intelligent life in the universe, yet it barely made the news. Why, after millennia spent staring up at the night sky, would this be our response?

Because, sadly, the hearings are just another X-Files episode. Rather than a grand discovery, these “biologics” have been reduced to a political scandal in which citizens are told, once again, that their government has been lying to them. It’s become a kind of disaster fatigue — there are too many problems in the world for us to care about something we already knew.

We’ve spent all these years waiting and hoping, just to let our terrestrial struggles overshadow all the excitement. To quote Kurt Vonnegut’s Tralfamadorians, “So it goes.”

We’re (probably) not alone. Alright, we can accept that; but when the UFOs fly in for a chat, how will we see ourselves reflected in them? If science fiction is anything to go by, they’re going to have the same problems we do.

Instead, perhaps, when we imagine distant beings, we’re really looking for someone to tell us that we aren’t the only ones who struggle and fight among ourselves. Out there, in the cosmos, might be a friendly face willing to forgive us and lead us to a better future. 

Despite all our faults, we don’t want to be the monsters in someone else’s movie.