A HOSTILE EARTH | AN ALIEN PERSPECTIVE
A bulletin column is hardly the place for an adequate consideration of the possibility of extraterrestrial life. I resolve nothing here. To suggest otherwise would be insulting to those who dedicate their lives to the question. That said, I do think the consideration of whether there are one world or many may serve to illuminate something about our human condition - something hard for us to see because it is the very thing that blinds us. To be clear, then, I am not attempting to solve the problem but only to borrow the subject of this centuries-old consideration of the plurality of worlds in order to say something about sin.
We’ve all inherited sin from the fall of our first earthly parents; that we know. We call it “original” because it happened at the origin of the human experience. Humanity is a river polluted at its source. My point here is not to make life harder for you by remembering that, but to offer you a way of verifying the truth of that doctrine in order to confirm our common need (and the need of all peoples) for the salvation that comes to us in Christ Jesus and His Blessed Mother (which is the whole reason we’re doing this right now: living as the Church, priest and people). So, here it is.
It seems to me a helpful way of educating ourselves to the gravity of the sin we inherit from Adam and Eve may be to imagine it as something offensive even to other life forms. Of course, sin adversely affects everything in the created order of this world, over which man has dominion; we know that. But as for the way sin affects our own souls and our relationships with one another (something we find harder to do precisely because our intelligence is itself darkened by it), imagining how extraterrestrial beings may experience it might help. For example, the question of “Where are they?” and “If they could so easily, why don’t they come here?” may be answered by the angels with the embarrassing, “They’re just not that into you.”
Interviews with people claiming to have had encounters with other lifeforms, for example, not seldom include attempts to describe what they perceived to be fear in the eyes of those otherworldly beings. The verity of each individual account aside, taken as a whole they may serve as a way of helping us to “feel” the weight of sin by imagining it reflected in the eyes of a horrified visitor to our world. Does that make sense?
In other words, whether sin has us like people in a museum standing so close to the masterpiece of our humanity we can scarcely make out its beauty, or like fish who when asked, “How’s the water?” can only reply, “What’s water?” because we’ve been swimming in sin for so long, the eyes of a being who senses and telepathically communicates that the human race is malicious may actually be a helpful reminder to us of just how deeply wounded our humanity is.
A quick search reveals that Saint Albert the Great, for example, the 13th century patron saint of philosophy and science, called the question of extra-terrestrial life, “wondrous and noble.” Maybe that’s because the only way for us (human beings) to recover a sense of the wonder and nobility of our humanity requires us first to acknowledge our sins. Isn’t that how we begin every Mass? “Let us acknowledge our sins.” Why begin with that? Because the Mass is God’s way of reordering the cosmos of man, all things over which he has dominion, as well as his perception of (and relationship to) the still many more things he does not.
Zooming out a bit, one might begin to see perhaps why man feels so overlooked by the rest of the universe. Of course it is more entertaining, and more profitable, for the constructors of our world to perpetuate a narrative that would have us fear aliens. But the question, “Why don’t they show themselves to us?” may be answered best by the child who lives in an abusive home. That child knows full well why nobody comes to visit. And if they do, God help them. +