We are brought into a world of excitement and opportunity.
We find and hold to our loves, our pleasures.
We grow tired and weep at the loss of youth, the loss of our loves, of our pleasures.
Surrounded by memories, we settle into our quiet, empty cell.
We die, more often than not, completely alone.

O, to perpetually find these loves, these pleasures. To keep what we need for life to mean anything at all. To grip the Cosmic Everfar of eternity and give it a firm shake. To climb the infinite road to the stars, to find those crossroads, to wrap ourselves in the infinite network of all things. To climb the mount of Pelion and sit in light conversation with the mighty Kheiron, a son to the Titan Kronos and teacher to Achilles, Æskulapius, Herakles, Jason, Æneaus, and Peleus.

If advanced civilizations do exist out there, may they be thoughtful in their advance, be generous of heart, be valiant in their efforts. To win the stars requires a civilization that holds to these characteristics, to become godlike, for to be otherwise is to force one’s efforts to be erring, wanting, trying, to require correction, to become exhausting. Logic and peace rule the heavens above, with the occasional spark of violence. I feel that we must become likewise.

In fide et fortitudine — virtuosus in aeternum. (With faith and courage — ever virtuous.)

For me, the fascination with ETI is the validation of my own faith, that there is a meaning of some kind to it all, even if it is only that the universe is fundamentally knowable, that it makes sense. And it is only faith. I don’t know it for sure, no one can. My conviction, my faith, is not intellectual necessity. Even I understand it is a historical accident, a cultural conceit. I have inherited the Western intellectual tradition from the Ionian philosophers of almost three thousand years ago. It is not a Law of Nature or a logical inevitability, its just the way I was brought up, an artifact of where and when I was born.

If the little green men are out there, its because there are natural laws that make them inevitable, that its not a whim, or blind luck, that we are not alone. How terrible it would be if we were just a pointless, random accident, signifying nothing. We can never know for sure that we are alone, but at least its possible that one day we’ll learn we’re not. Its possible, but even that is not a sure thing.

I believe that is the reason we all come here, to the Zone, that is. We seek the company of others who also seek. We hope our knowledge of scientific law (or for some of us, ideological political certainty) will provide us with certainty, rescue us from the loneliness. But when the idea of a traditional god can no longer be seriously considered, the Mystery is not solved, it just gets deeper. This is what the Principle of Mediocrity is all about, or as astronomers call it, The Perfect Cosmological Principal.

The PCP tells us that the no matter where or when we are in the universe, if we look as far as we can see in any direction, we will always see pretty much the same thing, the same distribution of matter, the same density of energy, the same architecture, the same repeated structures always different in detail but essentially the same overall.

But that comfortable, reassuring idea has been shown to be mistaken, by direct empirical observation (and in my lifetime!). The universe had a beginning, and it will have an end. It evolves, it rushes to some final, entropic state, it is mortal too, and if we look far enough away it appears to be fundamentally different than it is right here. That is an astonishing fact. That we can even say this with some high degree of certainty is itself astonishing.

The alien creature under an alien sun is our guarantee of some kind of immortality. We know when we die, which is inevitable, our race will carry on. And when our race dies, which is also inevitable, we want to know someone will carry on. We need to know that intelligence, consciousness, sentience will continue, that it is immortal. We are afraid of chaos, we fear and hate death, it is the ultimate mediocrity.

In Ursula K Leguin’s “The Left Hand of Darkness”, one of her characters says that it is pointless to be able to foretell the future because there is only one question that really matters, whether or not we die. And we already know the answer.

Something may be found which prevents life elsewhere. But how is it there is life here? And if there is life here, it’s possible and can be replicated.

So, let’s give it time. Nothing else to do anyway.

The sea and the land both teem with life, but the richest and most hospitable place for living things is the tidal zone, between the low and high water mark.

Life not only seeks hospitable conditions, it also thrives in areas, and times, of constant change. There are other dimensions to reality besides space and time, like complexity.

Once again, consider Carson’s words…

“Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp. What is the message signaled by the hordes of diatoms, flashing their microscopic lights in the night sea? What truth is expressed by the legions of barnacles, whitening the rocks with their habitations, each small creature within finding the necessities of its existence in the sweep of the surf? And what is the meaning of so tiny a being as the transparent wisp of protoplasm that is a sea lace, existing for some reason inscrutable to us — a reason that demands its presence by the trillion amid the rocks and weeds of the shore? The meaning haunts and ever eludes us, and in its very pursuit we approach the ultimate mystery of Life itself.”

From The Edge of the Sea
- Rachel Carson (1955)