I: Beginnings

“The kingdom of the insects on Earth dwarfs our human population to insignificance. Although we share the same surface area, insects are barely aware of human presence unless we swat them, cropdust, step on an ant mound, or examine them under our microscopes. As far as the vast insect world is concerned, contact with humans is a rare and usually traumatic occurrence. Such is the narrow focus of insects.

Likewise, perhaps a species of greater intelligence, greater technology, and much smaller population coexists with us on Earth, living who-knows-where, and only infrequently do they step on our “nests” of humanity, or examine us under their microscopes. Perhaps we cannot even recognize the presence of the “Others” unless it’s a case of deliberate interference on their part, a rare and traumatic occurrence. Such is the narrow focus of humans.”

— Charles Miller, from Home Field Advantage,

The Anomalist: 8, Spring 2000

I like to think like an alien. Consider that the source and home of sublimely advanced ‘alien intelligences’ we speculate upon the existence of would have to be ‘a planet in space’. Earth, it turns out, is a planet in space, and she’s probably at least a few billion years old. My own heritage as an organism reaches all the way back to the inception of life here, and thus I must actually be ‘an alien’ in so much as an alien is a ‘really old’ species from ‘a planet in space’. I’m at least as old as life on Earth, and possibly older for at least three interesting reasons. One is that Life on Earth may have arrived here from somewhere else, and it could have already been incredibly old when it migrated. The second is that whatever it is that organizes Life from matter might be way older than any number we can make. The third is too complex to go into in detail about here, but I’ll just say that when you move multiple trillions of organisms living on Earth around the Sun one time that’s not exactly ‘1 year’ at all.

How old would the first terrestrial organism be, if it were ‘still alive’? One answer is that it is still alive, and I am that organism. So are you. The truth about our ‘age’ is not that we were born some 10 or 30 or 50 years ago — we were born when Life on Earth was born, and it’s likely that we’re far older even than that. Life on Earth is incredibly adept at leaping gaps of every possible kind, but it’s particularly adept at leaping the gap created by the death of individuals. Ever since the first organism, Life has been leaping the gap of death ever more adeptly. In fact, Life has been leaping all kinds of gaps. The very act of reading these words is just another instance of Life learning to jump gaps — in this case, it’s the gap between my mind and experience and yours, and the gap between my ideas about ‘what an alien is’ and our common models.

Whatever that first form of organismal life on Earth may have been, at this point in time it has differentiated into at least millions of unique instances of itself all around me: It’s impossible that any of them could be ‘less complete’ than I am — they’re just complete in unique ways, sizes, forms, speeds, activities and character. Earth is chock-full of anciently evolved aliens — and I’m one of them. Each one represents a complex and peculiar mode of ‘alien intelligence’ — the only kind available on ‘planets in space’. For me, the whole idea of having contact with ‘an alien species’ is pretty much the same as having contact with any life-form I may encounter — there isn’t anything else to meet. With the exception of humans, most of the other inhabitants of Earth appear to share my perspective — and they think like aliens, too.

When I say that I live on a planet filled with ancient aliens, I mean that my experience of seeing a tree, or a raven, or a bee is a very similar kind of experience to one I would have if people flew down from the sky in a ship and came out so I could behold them. To me, the idea that a spaceship is required, or that an alien has to look like a person, or has to be from a planet that isn’t Earth is misinformed. I think of the other inhabitants of Earth as peoples. Bees represent a complexly evolved and highly intelligent ‘celestial species’, right outside my door. Like me, they arose on a planet in space. Because I don’t compare their intelligence with our own in the flat way applied by most adults, there’s no conflict between my perception of them as intelligent aliens and the fact that they don’t use spaceships to fly around, or that our technology looks advanced compared to theirs. From my perspective, their technologies vastly supercede those employed by humans in many obvious and miraculous ways. Bees don’t have wars that kill not only bees but everything else that happens to be in the way, and they are so good at what they do that they don’t need machines, don’t have to serve machines, and don’t make toxic exhaust. Compared to their ways of knowing and being, ‘the way we are advanced’ isn’t much of an advance at all. It might even be something deadly mimicking advancement.

I suppose I learned to think like an alien as a child, but throughout my life I’ve read a lot of science-fiction. This is a branch of literature where the other people who like to think like aliens hide. My experience was that science-fiction was like a sort of food that helped me learn to wander outside the common human ways of thinking about and valuing knowledge. Many of the authors in this field are very adept at seeing the blind-spots in our human ways of knowing from outside, and I always found their ideas and perspectives fascinating. Some of these writers are definitely prophets — they ‘see the future’ with incredible clarity, and with great humility. Writers of science-fiction have been my teachers since I was little. To some degree, I am still little because their writing allowed me to remain at least partially unencumbered by the strange necessities of more common ‘human’ perspectives.

I remember being a child with some clarity. During my youth, I was consistently puzzled by the thinking, ideas, and activities of adults. Adults seemed like a whole other species, and their ways of thinking and talking about the universe and its participants and relations seemed strangely flattened. They were really good at turning everything into a shadow — their approach too commonly had only a single dimension, took the color out of everything, discarded most of the important parts and meanings, and played the expert with the remainder. Of course, as a child I wasn’t able to so clearly understand or speak about these matters. But a lot of the time adults seemed like ‘busted aliens’ because of the flat character of their perspectives. Perhaps even more puzzling, they had all these interesting ideas about why it was ‘just fine’ to kill up a whole bunch of other organisms — people, animals, plants, insects — you name it. Throughout almost my entire life this specific aspect of human behavior has shocked, angered, frustrated and attacked me. It doesn’t feel safe to live on a planet with broken aliens running around killing everything in sight and brushing it off by applying some absurdly ill-considered excuse such as ‘Nature kills creatures all the time’.

I think it’s no accident that many children feel they came here from another world. They probably did. Whether it was a physical world, or a spiritual one is a question worth keeping an open and inquisitive relationship with. But it could even be someplace so unlike to our common ideas that neither of those options are sufficient. Or it might be that we came from ‘there to here’ in more than one way. Personally, I always felt that I came here from someplace amazing, and I tried to nurture the vague but important memories of ‘the time before I was here as me’. Sometimes, I would think of this place as another planet where the people live and learn in a way that is heartful and sincere rather than confused and dangerous. At other times I would try to imagine a spirit-place, but in general that was difficult because the models I could find to feed my imaginings often seemed like adults had crafted them — they were too flat. Regardless, I always had the strong and general feeling that ‘we come from somewhere else’ — probably in more ways than one. When I think like an alien, I just pretend this is true — that I am from a miraculously amazing place, and that I still remember our alien games of relating with other beings and the strange stuff humans call ‘knowledge’.

But what if there isn’t anything else but an ancient and superbly intelligent alien — all around us, in millions of forms we simply aren’t willing to credential? What if the signals SETI is hoping to find in space, are actually right here? What if there isn’t anything but those signals and they exist in the dimension of living relation, rather than radio waves?

Humans exhibit a serious set of problems with how we acquire, relate with and enact knowledge. I’ve often thought that if an intelligent being from another world came to Earth they would very likely be able to immediately reveal the sources of the problems with our relations with knowledge — problems that have kept us stuck in cycles of self-generated atrocity for thousands of years. In this sense, I have often wondered what they might see from outside our perspectives, and when I think like an alien, I try to examine our species as though I was amongst them but not of them. This leads me to explore things that, in general, humans can’t explore because the shape of what they ‘already know’ denies them access.

The modes of approach we are taught to apply to learning and knowledge require that we begin and proceed as if everything around and within us is extremely distinct and specific. This is due in part to our habitual application of broken logics. These logics coerce us into granting more importance to what makes things and beings different than to what makes them the same. But aliens, while they can do this too, may well possess multiple kinds of games like this. From an alien’s perspective, the universe might be extremely general — even in precedence to all appearances of distinction or separation. An alien might be able to experience the universe of time, beings and space as so general that anything that is available anywhere in timeSpace is actually always available everywhere — all the time. Right here, in you or me, for example.

In a universe where this were true, ‘Life’ might be the result of the ‘local reception’ of a very general and everpresent signal. The signal would act to connect all of the ‘alien intelligence’ in all of time and space — the ultimate game of ‘crossing gaps’. What we call matter might merely be organizing itself toward ever-greater local expression of the character-content of this signal, and anywhere the necessary complexity could be thus assembled, ‘aliens’ would suddenly arise and begin the game of adapting to local conditions together. They might think of it as ‘riding the great signal’. Over eons of time, these aliens would become increasingly adept at translating the content of this signal into relational behavior and proficient adaptation to local circumstances. While each world thus capable would create many forms, sizes and characters of alien — any world anywhere would still be a result of the local response to the ever-present (and ever-changing) signal. All the forms there would be equally (yet uniquely) ‘advanced’. The result of a game like this is a grandiosely diversified sort of ‘living library’ on any planet complex enough to give birth to and sustain Life. Each instance of life would be a perfectly unique yet perfectly complete local ‘version’ of the accumulated receptions of the universal signal ‘over time’. Each participant, regardless of their size or superficial complexity, would represent a living book preserving the accumulated sum of local reception since the game began.

But suppose on some planets something interfered with this game, and some of the aliens who used to be like all the other forms of life on their world diverged from the signal and started following something else. These hapless creatures no longer had access to the incredible wonders of learning and unity available across the transport of the signal. All they had was a vague and troubling memory of it. A memory of wonder. It might even be recorded in their histories from times back when they were still sort of in contact with it. Sometimes, when I am thinking like an alien, I realize that our perspective on ancient civilizations is somewhat similar to the perspectives of adults as they regard the intelligence and activity of children. Too often they dismiss most of what is amazing and important in these activities, and in so doing they dismiss their own true nature, as well as ‘the way back to contact with the central song’.

Whether or not there is such a signal, on our world, a crisis has ensued in our relationship with our own intelligence, and particularly with our ‘ways of knowing’. The crisis takes the same form in our activity as it does in our minds, such that the paving of a natural place for the convenience of being able to build on or travel over it in machines flattens it, takes away the color, subtracts the life there, and leaves us in possession of nothing that is alive or hospitable. While it appears to serve utilitarian purposes and useful functions the actual result is a form of annihilation, where most of what is at once important and truly useful is abolished in favor of a single, very mono-dimensional relationship with value. This process and its outcomes don’t actually value Life at all, and in discarding this crucial element they become omnicidal. We are Life, and living beings do not prosper when flattened. As organisms we express the richness or impoverishment of the environments we inhabit — and when they are flattened and reduced to sameness — so are we.

Similarly, our intelligence, when flattened, begins attacking everything in and around us, almost as if the very existence of wondrous diversity held the ever-present threat of openly revealing the flatness and dimensionless quality of the shadows we serve and sustain. These shadows, sensing the threat of their loss of power over us, drive us to extreme acts in their defense — such that we can contrive and enact myriad forms of atrocity without ever really being aware of what we are doing — or why. When I think like other humans, these matters are not clear to me. But when I begin to play the game of thinking like an alien, whole new vistas of opportunity and wonder emerge from the shadows of what I’ve been taught to believe about Nature, living beings, the universe, and knowledge itself. Some of these vistas grant me access to entirely new ways of knowing, and that’s my favorite part of the game. I think that if we look around at our history and present moment as a sentient species, we can clearly see that the ways of knowing we possess and enact are not very friendly to living beings. In many cases, the living beings are being sacrificed in favor of these invisible competitors who are so aggressively organized to insure their own survival that our survival becomes a trivial matter in comparison.

Even though I like to think like an alien, and explore the possibilities of communication with the other aliens all around me, I have always wondered what it would be like to meet another intelligence like our own, but vastly advanced beyond ours. The kind we think of when we think of aliens arriving on Earth in space-ships. I always hoped to have the opportunity to learn from an ‘advanced’ species, and I thought that such an experience would be amazing beyond anything I could imagine. In truth, I considered it unlikely that I would ever get to have such an experience. It seemed like I’d need some kind of technology I didn’t possess in order to call them, or that, even if they did visit Earth, the chances of me encountering such visitors were extremely slim. I suppose I was trapped in the limited definitions that I had acquired from my contact with human ideas about what aliens are and do.

The one thing I didn’t realize was that there might be a lot of different kinds of ‘advanced intelligences’ and that contact didn’t require machines at all. The one thing I never suspected was that I myself might be a sort of radio — designed to receive a ‘universal signal’ that all the aliens anywhere could use as a telephone — any time they wanted. It just never occurred to me that I might be made of everything needed to establish contact with a non-human intelligence. I suppose the many models I had read or heard got in the way of my ability to see something incredibly general about Life and the universe: that everything everywhen is talking to each other, all the time. What an amazing and wonderful game!