And so concludes this spatial sci-fi week of shots, from the fake, to the surreal, to the po-litical to the tenuous, all photos have just about clung on to the theme in question. As for the above, I must confess, it is not a real alien. It is a window display’s impression of what an alien might look like. What are the chances of a creature from outer space actually looking like that? Probably slim. What are the chances of there being creatures from outer space full stop? Its a very big area that has been around for a very long time so chances are actually very high. Will we ever meet them? No, chances are extremely low. Not only would we need to be relatively close to them, in universal terms, we would also need to exist within the same time frame as them as well and the chances of these two factors converging in a gargantuan space spread over billions of years is microscopically low.
The Fermi Paradox explores another angle, which is that intelligent civilisations will destroy themselves just as they would be reaching capacity for interstellar travel and that is a possibility that might relate to the developments occurring on our own little planet Earth right now. If you want a glimpse into what life on earth might be in the future watch Wall-E. The human race ends up filling up the planet with garbage and relocating to the stars. First bit check. Second bit, not so much. In the film Gravity, the opening line is: “In space, life is impossible”. And it really is. Despite what movies will tell you, colonies on other planets is an incredibly difficult thing to achieve. Think about how much the H2 fast train is costing to get from London to Birmingham. Its in the billions. We can’t even afford to keep our youth clubs going in this country. What chance have we got to fund interplanetary travel?
We have seriously taken for granted that a breathable atmosphere with a temperature that is conducive to our species is a given but as the effects of climate change take hold of this delicate eco-system we live in and are apart of , we see that it is anything but. It will be up to us to try to undo what has been done and prevent this living organism spinning through space from shaking us off like a bad cold.
I look up at the stars, well not in London obviously, you can’t see shit, but i have some luminous ones stuck to the ceiling of my bedroom, and I look up at them and I don’t really care what aliens would look like, but I do wonder if they are fucking up their habitat and destroying everything same as us. Are they arguing and fighting and waging wars or are they at one with themselves, each other and the Universe? If it is just us, and we are making a mess of the only place that holds life in our galaxy and in the other hundreds of billions of galaxies as well, that is truly a horrendous thought. I just hope there are some species, somewhere up there, doing a better job because if we are the guardians and sole providers of existence in a sea of darkness that would be really tragic because we are clearly not cut out to do it successfully. For all our advancement and technological creations we can’t live sustainably which means we are not evolved at all. We are actually less evolved than our ancestors because they were at least able to do that.
