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If Intelligent Life Finds Us

If we encounter alien life beyond whatever has crept under a rock on Mars or the Moon; that is to say, if we encounter advanced alien life, it will not be because we found it, but because it found us.  We can barely get to the Moon or Mars.  The places where other intelligent life has its best chances are incredibly far away.  Bridging those spaces is far beyond what we can do now.  Maybe something that began long, long before we did has come to the stage at which it can come here.

I am at the age at which funerals are common events.  To be eligible to join the Tucson Old Timers baseball club, you have to be 60.  One comes to expect that one or the other of us will die, and that death will come to all of us, eventually.  "Eventually" may or may not be far away.

Because we have come to intelligence and awareness, even to self-awareness, we know and think about dying.  It saddens us.  We have invented lots of ways of thinking about how it might not be true.  Sometimes it is almost comical:  listen to the TV series, Chopped", sometime.  Almost every panel of contestants has a cook who is chopping onions and making sauces to please a parent or grandparent who is looking down at them from somewhere up beyond the ceiling.

If an alien critter ever discovers us, they will undoubtedly look at earth with a longer perspective.  Human beings--they surely will conclude--are a very successful species;  maybe not at successful as mosquitos and microbes and bacteria and viruses, but very successful.  Humans are to be found almost everywhere on the globe, not only in growing numbers, but threatening to almost every other form of intelligent life on earth.  The human numbers keep growing.  Some of them die, of course, but their numbers keep growing.  It is just a matter of how well the species does, and we do well.

So what is it to be alive?  Is it just what happens to us individually?  Or is it how well we do, all together?  How well we do, all together, depends on how successful the individuals are, and how well an individual can do depends on how well all of us do together.

An intelligent alien will surely conclude that human beings are very successful, indeed; almost too well.

The Tucson Old Timers baseball team has been playing since 1968:  about three years short of 50 years.  Not a single member of the original team is still playing, of course.   Like everything else, like a family or a species, we overlap the generations.  Our identities are in our continuity.

What counts is, when we have the chance, what we do to make things better or worse for everyone.  It is not so much about me as it is about us.

At least, I think that is what an intelligent observer from . . . from anywhere . . . would say.


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