People like to imagine that there are thousands of worlds in the universe with beings on them that, like us, like to travel, trade goods and wage wars. At least that's one explanation for the popularity of Star Wars. People cling to this fanciful notion - the same way they cling to many others - despite growing certainty that it cannot possibly be true.
Long ago in one of the e-mails that preceded this blog, I considered the Fermi Paradox, which is the question "Where is everyone?" in a universe with hundreds of billions of stars and ten times that many planets. I reacted then to an article I'd read that said the Fermi paradox "proved" that societies capable of space travel destroy themselves before they develop the technology to travel to the stars (because, just like us, they would want to do that).
I proposed some other "proofs": interstellar travel is not and never will be possible; or, aliens have found us and decided to leave us alone; or, still my favourite, giant space spiders.
Clever thinkers in the meantime have added to the already long odds of the enormity of space and time, the insane rarity of the evolution of space-travelling beings. Think about it this way: we imagine ourselves to be the most intelligent species ever, yet we've barely figured out how to get to the moon.
It's hard to accept the evidence of our own eyes, but the Fermi Paradox is no more a paradox than "Where are all the unicorns?": there are no space travelling beings because, so far as we will ever be able to tell, they don't exist.
Which brings me to Blade Runner.
Released in 1982, based on a story published in 1968, and imagining the world in 2019, Blade Runner mashes together a retro, hard-boiled dick sensibility with a brutalist Pacific rim aesthetic. I watched it last night.
In 1982, it was possible to imagine that by 2019 there'd be flying cars and mass-produced artificial life, plus glow-handle umbrellas and stores that sell eyeballs. But it was not possible in 1982 to imagine that by 2019 no one would smoke indoors. Interior shots through veils of smoke make the movie look dated even more than its DOS-based computers.
Because of these and other inescapable limitations wrought by time and space, the movie has transformed over the years from the vision of a dystopian future to a kind of parallel reality: Earth if you rewound the tape, played it back and got a different result.
Which brings me back to Fermi's putative paradox. Stephen J. Gould said in Wonderful Life (a study of the Burgess Shale fossils) that the results of evolution are improbable. If you rewound the tape of life on Earth and played it again, you would not get the same result. You might not even get humans.
Our existence, let alone our intelligence, is a fluke the size of the universe. People looking for a source of wonder could just consider the fact that we are here at all. And anyone feeling alone in the universe should watch My Octopus Teacher.
Thanks for reading!
Have a great week!
Karen
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