Posthuman Blues

My recent post on alleged extraterrestrials has aroused some (deserved) skepticism. Advocates of the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis argue, for instance, that the UFO evidence supports the existence of an advanced, presumably spacefaring technology. Superficially, at least, this seems more congruent with flesh-and-blood space visitors than trans-mythical interlopers from the Great Beyond.

In defense of "ultraterrestrials" (which I'll broadly define as unconventional humanoids from Earth or variations thereof), I suggest that the high-performance flight characteristics commonly associated with UFOs don't necessarily imply ET origin (although I wouldn't be in the least surprised if the parade of close encounters that fall under the ufological rubric include at least some genuine visits from advanced interstellar societies).

Although perhaps unlikely, I think it's perfectly conceivable that a technically superior civilization could have arisen on Earth in the distant past. This civilization needn't be particularly large nor would its technology have to be centuries or millennia ahead of our own; the rate of technological change in the Western world, as students of the "Singularity" are fond of reminding us, is exponential, rendering accurate forecasts of the future effectively impossible.

(Within two centuries -- certainly a blip on an evolutionary time-scale -- we've harnessed electromagnetism and nuclear energy, events largely unforeseeable by the preceding zeitgeist. If certain rumors can be accepted at face value, an element within the military is actively experimenting with electrogravitic propulsion, in which case we may be encroaching on a functioning theory of quantum gravity.)





If an ultraterrestrial offshoot of the human species is indeed operating in our midst, we can reasonably expect it to have made huge technological advances given the time it would have had to develop (perhaps in tandem with our own technical progression). "Alien" UFOs, while undoubtedly remarkable from today's engineering perspective, may only be a century or so more advanced than earthly technology. Unfortunately, to my mind, we've become accustomed to thinking of aliens as being from far-away star systems, which in turn tends to make ufologists and SETI pundits alike think in terms of hundreds of thousands -- if not billions -- of years.





The "Ultraterrestrial Hypothesis," as presented here, hinges on what we know of our species' genetic and social history. Bluntly: Could we be sharing our world with virtual aliens and not even know it? My answer, equally blunt: Why not? As our scientific instruments improve, we discover mounting evidence that the popularly accepted history of homo sapiens sapiens is incomplete. (The recent discovery of the Flores "hobbits," for example, was unexpected enough to temporarily fuse the disciplines of cryptozoology and paleoanthropology, especially when it became clear that there existed a rich oral tradition of small, hairy people among the local population. Intriguingly, these hairy people were said to kidnap infants -- a trend that recurs explicitly in both fairy lore and contemporary accounts of fetus-snatching Gray aliens.)

In addition to gaps in terrestrial history, we're confronted by the possible existence of parallel universes, a theme that's attracted the attention of mainstream cosmologists who no longer speak of reality in terms of a singular "universe," but as a bewildering amalgam dubbed the "multiverse." (Ufologists will immediately seize on Jacques Vallee's use of the same term, as recounted in his iconoclastic study "Dimensions.")

As theoretical physicists narrow their search for a Theory of Everything, calculating the quantum wave function of our entire universe (as opposed to those of single elementary particles), new vistas of exploration appear, unbidden, like a froth of bubbles set loose from a bottle of well-shaken Perrier.

Could these realms -- so seemingly intangible -- harbor clues to the reality of some of our unlikely visitors?