Is There Anybody There?

My science-fiction enthusiasms are limited and lie elsewhere, so I never got into the BBC comedy series Red Dwarf. I did read one of the books, though (I can’t quite remember how I was in a position to do so) and was struck by the fact that in the story there are no aliens. Obnoxious former spaceship maintenance technician Rimmer, reduced to a virtual existence as a hologram, dreams of one day encountering aliens who will have the technology to restore his body, but he is doomed to disappointment as the somewhat bleak narrative insists that life was a one-off terrestrial accident, and all the races the Red Dwarf crew meet are evolved from Earth creatures. Gradually the truth becomes clear, even while Rimmer refuses to accept it.

I suspect that life is indeed unique to this planet, but I might be about to be proved wrong. On Sunday the BBC carried reports of the US Congress investigative sessions looking into Unidentified Aerial Phemonena, UAPs, as UFOs are now generally known having undergone a rebranding. The committee had been hearing from David Grusch, a former senior military intelligence officer who claims – while not having seen the evidence directly himself – that for some decades, according to many officials he had spoken to, the US military has been in possession of alien technology and ‘non-human biologics’. The congressmen and -women seemed to be trying deliberately to remain sober and unexcitable at this startling claim, The World This Weekend averred. Why should we believe Mr Grusch? Jim Naughtie asked US journalist and writer on UAPs Leslie Kean; ‘not only have I spoken to him about this’, she said, ‘but to others off the record, and they all told me exactly the same thing’. And there, somewhat frustratingly, the news show left it.

If any of this has substance, the question arises as to why everyone involved has kept quiet about it for so long. To all appearances, alien technology doesn’t seem to have made its way into US military hardware, so it doesn’t seem that there are secrets of that sort which have been guarded to keep them away from the States’ enemies. I’m also unconvinced by the picture we seem to have that cities will be full of people running around screaming the moment it becomes clear that there are aliens: ‘the government keeps it quiet to avoid panic’. In fact most people seem to accept the argument that the universe is so vast that there must logically be life out there somewhere, so it would seem bizarre to be thrown into hysteria by having this belief confirmed. If the aliens are technologically advanced enough to have reached Earth (and then crashed), presumably they could destroy us already if they wanted to, so that doesn’t seem worth worrying about either. In fact, the sheer unlikelihood of so big a secret being kept for decades is, for me, the strongest argument that there isn’t a secret at all.

The Christian religion is absolutely Earth-centric: ‘in the fullness of time you made us, the crown of all creation’, one of the Common Worship communion prayers goes, echoing the language of Psalm 8. It will take quite some readjustment to cope with a sudden expansion of the horizons of life beyond the bounds of this small globe, to shapes and forms that possibly won’t resemble us and our understandings at all. I have no doubt that we can do it, given flexibility and imagination, and come up with some explanation for the eternal and universal God choosing this one miniscule corner of the Milky Way to be incarnate that might, perhaps, make sense to a small furry creature from Alpha Centauri. Perhaps the time is approaching when we will have to.