Post by auntym on Mar 20, 2018 12:20:17 GMT -6
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Reasons to Believe
How seriously should you take those recent reports of UFOs? Ask the Pentagon. Or read this primer for the SETI-curious.
By David Wallace-Wells, James D. Walsh, Neel Patel, Clint Rainey, Katie Heaney, Eric Benson, and Tim Urban
March 20, 2018
In the good old days, the arrival of UFOs on the front page of America’s paper of record might have seemed like a loose-thread tear right through the fabric of reality — the closest that secular, space-race America could have gotten to a Second Coming. Two decades ago, or three, or six, we would’ve also felt we knew the script in advance, thanks to the endless variations pop culture had played for us already: civilizational conflicts to mirror the real-world ones Americans had been imagining in terror since the beginning of the Cold War.
But when, in December, the New York Times published an undisputed account of what might once have sounded like crackpot conspiracy theory — that the Pentagon had spent five years investigating “unexplained aerial phenomena” — the response among the paper’s mostly liberal readers, exhausted and beaten down by “recent events,” was markedly different from the one in those movies. The news that aliens might actually be visiting us, regularly and recently, didn’t provoke terror about a coming space-opera conflict but something much more like the Evangelical dream of the Rapture the same liberals might have mocked as kooky right-wing escapism in the George W. Bush years. “The truth is out there,” former senator Harry Reid tweeted, with a link to the story. Thank God, came the response through the Twitter vent. “Could extraterrestrials help us save the Earth?” went one typical reaction.
Suddenly, aliens were an escapist fantasy — but also more credible (legitimized by the government!) than mere fantasy. That Pentagon report, which featured two gripping videos of aerial encounters, was just one beat in a recent search-for-extraterrestrial-intelligence (or SETI) drumroll: In October, an object passed through our solar system that looked an awful lot like a spaceship; astronomers spent much of 2016 arguing over whether the weird pulses of light coming from a distant star were actually evidence of an “alien megastructure.” An army of Silicon Valley billionaires are racing to make first contact, and our new superpowered telescopes are discovering more conceivably habitable planets every year.
Then, in March, a third video emerged, featuring a Navy encounter off the East Coast in 2015, with the group that released it hinting at an additional trove. “Why doesn’t the Pentagon care?” wondered a Washington Post op-ed — surely the first time the newspaper of Katharine Graham was raising a stink about aliens. The next week, President Trump seemed to announce he was creating an entirely new branch of the military: “We’ll call it the Space Force.” You could be forgiven for thinking you’d woken up in a science-fiction novel. At the very least, it is starting to seem non-crazy to believe. A recent study shows half the world already does.
Alien dreams have always been powered by the desire for human importance in a vast, forgetful cosmos: We want to be seen so we know we exist. What’s unusual about the alien fantasy is that, unlike religion, nationalism, or conspiracy theory, it doesn’t place humans at the center of a grand story. In fact, it displaces them: Humans become, briefly, major players in a drama of almost inconceivable scale, the lasting lesson of which is, unfortunately: We’re total nobodies. That’s the lesson, at least, of a visit from aliens, who got here long before we were able to get there, wherever there is; if humans are the ones making first contact, we’re the advanced ones and the aliens are probably more like productive pond scum, which may be one reason we fantasize about those kinds of encounters a lot less than visits to Earth. Of course, when the aliens are the explorers, we’re the pond scum.
But a lot of people in the modern world will take that bargain, which should probably not surprise us given how dizzying, secular, and, um, alienating that world objectively is. Most conspiracy theory is fueled by a desire to see the universe as ultimately intelligible — the bargain being that things can make sense, but only if you believe in pervasive totalitarian malice. Alien conspiracy theory keeps the malice (cover-ups at Roswell, the Men in Black). But rather than benzo comforts like order and intelligibility, it offers the psychedelic drama of total unintelligibility — awe, wonder, a knee-wobblingly deep, mystical experience of existential igannance.
Floating Down (1990), by David Huggins, who makes oil paintings about his encounters with aliens. As featured in Love & Saucers, a 2017 documentary about the artist. Photo: David Huggins
Every extraterrestrial era has its own fantasy of consequentiality. Crop circles began as a phenomenon of the English countryside, then spread to the far corners of the onetime British Empire (Australia, Canada) after World War II, when the U.K. was falling unmistakably back in the ranks of nations and when its provincial subjects would have felt some understandable desire to demonstrate that, somehow, their lives really mattered. American encounters were invariably rural as well — typically farmers and ranchers, mostly in the country’s interior and the deserts and mountains of the West, in decades the country as a whole spent rapidly urbanizing and then industrializing its farmland so systematically it looked like Monsanto was trying to exterminate the American farmer along with the cotton bollworm.
These incidents, which never occurred in cities, where other witnesses could have verified them, were often reported as horror stories even as they may have expressed secret desires. But the pop culture of the same era introduced another mode: the suburban encounter, often still private and personal but more ooey-gooey New Age than abductions and anal probes. The two major authors were Steven Spielberg, who gave us broken-family theology in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T., and Carl Sagan, who gave us Cosmos and Contact, which, when it was turned into a movie, featured an eerie seascape that was basically a secular heaven, maintained by offscreen aliens explicitly playing the role of gods. Stephen Hawking, who died in March, was also a godfather of a sort, not just a physicist but a sage and guru for a generation of squishy-lefty seekers curious about life beyond Earth; among his last acts was partnering with Yuri Milner, a Russian billionaire building a giant SETI laboratory at UC Berkeley. Americans used to regard the space race with not just national but something like collectivist pride — all those government engineers from the new middle class. Suddenly, it’s the rich kids with the cool toys and the keys to the rocket ship.
Alien dreams have always been powered by the desire for human importance in a vast, forgetful cosmos: We want to be seen so we know we exist.
Which does mark a change. Beyond the mysticism, American stories of alien encounters have been (often anxious) meditations on the status of American power — meditations informed, surely, by both the memory of European settlers, for whom “first contact” was a story of triumphant genocide, and sympathy for those they trampled. Given the option, America will always prefer to play the cowboy, and through the post–Cold War 1990s, the dominant alien-encounter template was still the swaggering military strut of Independence Day. (The closest thing we got to a counterpoint was the cover-up paranoia of The X-Files, which just expressed a darker faith in the same American power.) By the time we got an alien epic for the War on Terror era, even Spielberg staged it as a story about armed conflict: The War of the Worlds. Of course, in that story, the winner was always going to be the humans — that is, the Americans. And then came the financial crisis, the recession, and Trump, and the new hope that E.T. may take pity on us.
Elsewhere in the world, where things are looking up, relatively speaking, you might expect a different perspective on aliens — and indeed, as The Atlantic’s Ross Andersen documented last fall, the Chinese have recently opened the world’s largest radar facility to listen for signs of aliens, wherever they are out there. But even our future Chinese overlords, projecting power for the first time into the ever-receding reaches of the universe, are a bit nervous about aliens; as Andersen points out, their popular science fiction bears the evidence. And why wouldn’t they be? They have their own memory of colonial contact — the Opium Wars, the end of that empire — to reckon with. And, besides, the unknown is just scary. Things have to get pretty bleak before you take a chance on the arrival of a total blank slate, just for the sake of change. —David Wallace-Wells
CONTINUE READING: nymag.com/selectall/2018/03/13-reasons-to-believe-aliens-are-real.html?utm_source=tw&utm_medium=s3&utm_campaign=sharebutton-b
Reasons to Believe
How seriously should you take those recent reports of UFOs? Ask the Pentagon. Or read this primer for the SETI-curious.
By David Wallace-Wells, James D. Walsh, Neel Patel, Clint Rainey, Katie Heaney, Eric Benson, and Tim Urban
March 20, 2018
In the good old days, the arrival of UFOs on the front page of America’s paper of record might have seemed like a loose-thread tear right through the fabric of reality — the closest that secular, space-race America could have gotten to a Second Coming. Two decades ago, or three, or six, we would’ve also felt we knew the script in advance, thanks to the endless variations pop culture had played for us already: civilizational conflicts to mirror the real-world ones Americans had been imagining in terror since the beginning of the Cold War.
But when, in December, the New York Times published an undisputed account of what might once have sounded like crackpot conspiracy theory — that the Pentagon had spent five years investigating “unexplained aerial phenomena” — the response among the paper’s mostly liberal readers, exhausted and beaten down by “recent events,” was markedly different from the one in those movies. The news that aliens might actually be visiting us, regularly and recently, didn’t provoke terror about a coming space-opera conflict but something much more like the Evangelical dream of the Rapture the same liberals might have mocked as kooky right-wing escapism in the George W. Bush years. “The truth is out there,” former senator Harry Reid tweeted, with a link to the story. Thank God, came the response through the Twitter vent. “Could extraterrestrials help us save the Earth?” went one typical reaction.
Suddenly, aliens were an escapist fantasy — but also more credible (legitimized by the government!) than mere fantasy. That Pentagon report, which featured two gripping videos of aerial encounters, was just one beat in a recent search-for-extraterrestrial-intelligence (or SETI) drumroll: In October, an object passed through our solar system that looked an awful lot like a spaceship; astronomers spent much of 2016 arguing over whether the weird pulses of light coming from a distant star were actually evidence of an “alien megastructure.” An army of Silicon Valley billionaires are racing to make first contact, and our new superpowered telescopes are discovering more conceivably habitable planets every year.
Then, in March, a third video emerged, featuring a Navy encounter off the East Coast in 2015, with the group that released it hinting at an additional trove. “Why doesn’t the Pentagon care?” wondered a Washington Post op-ed — surely the first time the newspaper of Katharine Graham was raising a stink about aliens. The next week, President Trump seemed to announce he was creating an entirely new branch of the military: “We’ll call it the Space Force.” You could be forgiven for thinking you’d woken up in a science-fiction novel. At the very least, it is starting to seem non-crazy to believe. A recent study shows half the world already does.
Alien dreams have always been powered by the desire for human importance in a vast, forgetful cosmos: We want to be seen so we know we exist. What’s unusual about the alien fantasy is that, unlike religion, nationalism, or conspiracy theory, it doesn’t place humans at the center of a grand story. In fact, it displaces them: Humans become, briefly, major players in a drama of almost inconceivable scale, the lasting lesson of which is, unfortunately: We’re total nobodies. That’s the lesson, at least, of a visit from aliens, who got here long before we were able to get there, wherever there is; if humans are the ones making first contact, we’re the advanced ones and the aliens are probably more like productive pond scum, which may be one reason we fantasize about those kinds of encounters a lot less than visits to Earth. Of course, when the aliens are the explorers, we’re the pond scum.
But a lot of people in the modern world will take that bargain, which should probably not surprise us given how dizzying, secular, and, um, alienating that world objectively is. Most conspiracy theory is fueled by a desire to see the universe as ultimately intelligible — the bargain being that things can make sense, but only if you believe in pervasive totalitarian malice. Alien conspiracy theory keeps the malice (cover-ups at Roswell, the Men in Black). But rather than benzo comforts like order and intelligibility, it offers the psychedelic drama of total unintelligibility — awe, wonder, a knee-wobblingly deep, mystical experience of existential igannance.
Floating Down (1990), by David Huggins, who makes oil paintings about his encounters with aliens. As featured in Love & Saucers, a 2017 documentary about the artist. Photo: David Huggins
Every extraterrestrial era has its own fantasy of consequentiality. Crop circles began as a phenomenon of the English countryside, then spread to the far corners of the onetime British Empire (Australia, Canada) after World War II, when the U.K. was falling unmistakably back in the ranks of nations and when its provincial subjects would have felt some understandable desire to demonstrate that, somehow, their lives really mattered. American encounters were invariably rural as well — typically farmers and ranchers, mostly in the country’s interior and the deserts and mountains of the West, in decades the country as a whole spent rapidly urbanizing and then industrializing its farmland so systematically it looked like Monsanto was trying to exterminate the American farmer along with the cotton bollworm.
These incidents, which never occurred in cities, where other witnesses could have verified them, were often reported as horror stories even as they may have expressed secret desires. But the pop culture of the same era introduced another mode: the suburban encounter, often still private and personal but more ooey-gooey New Age than abductions and anal probes. The two major authors were Steven Spielberg, who gave us broken-family theology in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T., and Carl Sagan, who gave us Cosmos and Contact, which, when it was turned into a movie, featured an eerie seascape that was basically a secular heaven, maintained by offscreen aliens explicitly playing the role of gods. Stephen Hawking, who died in March, was also a godfather of a sort, not just a physicist but a sage and guru for a generation of squishy-lefty seekers curious about life beyond Earth; among his last acts was partnering with Yuri Milner, a Russian billionaire building a giant SETI laboratory at UC Berkeley. Americans used to regard the space race with not just national but something like collectivist pride — all those government engineers from the new middle class. Suddenly, it’s the rich kids with the cool toys and the keys to the rocket ship.
Alien dreams have always been powered by the desire for human importance in a vast, forgetful cosmos: We want to be seen so we know we exist.
Which does mark a change. Beyond the mysticism, American stories of alien encounters have been (often anxious) meditations on the status of American power — meditations informed, surely, by both the memory of European settlers, for whom “first contact” was a story of triumphant genocide, and sympathy for those they trampled. Given the option, America will always prefer to play the cowboy, and through the post–Cold War 1990s, the dominant alien-encounter template was still the swaggering military strut of Independence Day. (The closest thing we got to a counterpoint was the cover-up paranoia of The X-Files, which just expressed a darker faith in the same American power.) By the time we got an alien epic for the War on Terror era, even Spielberg staged it as a story about armed conflict: The War of the Worlds. Of course, in that story, the winner was always going to be the humans — that is, the Americans. And then came the financial crisis, the recession, and Trump, and the new hope that E.T. may take pity on us.
Elsewhere in the world, where things are looking up, relatively speaking, you might expect a different perspective on aliens — and indeed, as The Atlantic’s Ross Andersen documented last fall, the Chinese have recently opened the world’s largest radar facility to listen for signs of aliens, wherever they are out there. But even our future Chinese overlords, projecting power for the first time into the ever-receding reaches of the universe, are a bit nervous about aliens; as Andersen points out, their popular science fiction bears the evidence. And why wouldn’t they be? They have their own memory of colonial contact — the Opium Wars, the end of that empire — to reckon with. And, besides, the unknown is just scary. Things have to get pretty bleak before you take a chance on the arrival of a total blank slate, just for the sake of change. —David Wallace-Wells
CONTINUE READING: nymag.com/selectall/2018/03/13-reasons-to-believe-aliens-are-real.html?utm_source=tw&utm_medium=s3&utm_campaign=sharebutton-b