One of the prompts that John has given us for this week’s Writer’s Workshop is this:

If evidence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe were discovered, would it alter your core beliefs or sense of self?

As regular readers will know, I’m not exactly renowned for my deep, insightful thinking, so I took this one on as a challenge to try to write something meaningful for once. Better late than never, I guess. And I’m already wondering if this was a good idea!

To begin with, can I define my sense of self and my core beliefs? For many I imagine that will involve a religious foundation, but that doesn’t work for me. I was brought up in the Church Of England, but have long since subscribed to the thought that a divine being guiding our lives is a concept that doesn’t work for me. I count myself as agnostic, still remaining to be convinced – I would never go completely down the route of atheism in case something happened to prove me wrong. But I really do have trouble believing that a caring, omniscient being could allow so much suffering and so many troubles in the world.

So how would I relate this to John’s question? When I was a kid I used to love the stories in comics about spacemen and visitors from other planets: Dan Dare taking on the Martians was an essential part of my week when I was at primary school, but I then progressed into more grown-up reading. That was when I read H.G.Wells’ The War Of The Worlds, probably when I was around 12 or so, and I’m not ashamed to admit that it terrified me! But it got me thinking. We assumed that we were an intelligent race, and when the 1969 moon landing didn’t find any evidence of the man on the moon that rather confirmed what many believed: we were the only form of intelligent life in the universe. How arrogant and ignorant is that! Just because we haven’t found signs of intelligent life on other planets doesn’t mean that it can’t exist: that belief is as much an admission of our shortcomings as it is a firm statement of fact.

So, if intelligent life were discovered elsewhere in the universe it would neither surprise me nor change my view on life. Who is to say that there aren’t other entities out there looking at us on Planet Earth, and laughing themselves silly at how we believe that we are alone in being capable of intelligent thought? And, given some of the choices we have made throughout history, who could blame them? In recent years the UK has voted for Brexit and for Boris Johnson as Prime Minister, while the US has twice voted in a criminal maniac as their President. These are hardly good examples to hold up of what intelligent thinking can produce, are they? And all the way through history there are so many examples of human stupidity that we really should stop thinking that we are superior to what and whoever might be ‘out there.’

Much of what I put on my blog is music-related, and it is fair to say that there have been many songs that have taken ‘outer space’ or ‘other worlds’ as their themes, some less seriously than others. Relax, I’m not about to play The Carpenters’ Calling Occupants Of Interplanetary Craft – it is hardly a serious piece of human thought, is it! I could also go for songs like Bowie’s Space Oddity or Reg’s Rocket Man, but again they miss the mark for me. The lyrics of another Bowie song are more closely aligned to my uncertainty about what is out there, though – this one:

Why not? Who can say with any degree of confidence that this couldn’t happen? I thought about playing some more songs in similar vein, but decided against it. This one sums up my thoughts perfectly: there may well be life forms on other planets, who may at some point decide to pay us a visit, if they haven’t already. You could hardly blame them for taking a look at our world and deciding that theirs might be better, can you!

In some ways, I rather hope that life is found in other worlds: it would keep that self-interested moron out of the news for a while!

I started this piece by saying that I wanted to produce something a little more deep and meaningful than my usual offerings. I guess I’ll have to keep trying … 🤣