The Possibility of Life by Jaime Green

Author:Jaime Green [Green, Jaime]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-02-14T19:14:33+00:00

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It’s a paradox: we want to understand the alien. We want to understand something impenetrable, to imagine the unknowable. Either that, or we want to discover a cosmos overflowing with people, as-of-yet unmet kin.

As Lem writes in Solaris:

We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don’t know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can’t accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, of a civilization superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past.

This isn’t a problem for writers as it is for Lem’s explorers; of course, our stories about aliens are about humanity, too. And we do know what to do with other worlds. We inhabit them.

Lem is also right that our narrative quests are often for a superior civilization. When we imagine aliens, we’re quite often imagining versions of our future selves, a superior civilization evolved from a common or analogous primeval past. We look to the stars, to the future, and hope or wonder: That could be us, too.

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