Is Anyone Out There?
While I primarily write Swords-n-Spells type fiction, I am also a Sci-Fi fan. I particularly like Sci-Fi stories that involve people traveling into the great unknown and coming into contact with extraterrestrial life. The subject of aliens is a mainstay in Sci-Fi literature, shows, movies, games, etc… That’s not surprising. I think humanity has an almost ingrained curiosity when it comes to wanting to know what or who is out there beyond our world. I also think we have a yearning to interact with other beings around our intellectual levels that can understand us but aren’t us. We humans are full of our own biases and preconceptions that sometimes interfere with our ability to interact with others of our own kind. It’s sort of like how sometimes people are more comfortable confessing things to complete strangers than to their own family members. Familiarity with the people around you is a good thing, but it can also sometimes block avenues of communication. I think to some extent we want to know what someone from the outside looking in might think about us. What we’d do with that insight when we got it…I don’t know. I’d like to think that, we as species, could be a little introspective and use that third-party input to improve ourselves. That could be wishful thinking on my part though.
Aliens seem like a long shot. The truth is that humanity has been in a similar position before. There was a time when the average person almost never travelled far from his or her village. Therefore, for most people, interacting with a foreign culture might have been comparable to talking to an alien. How did people in England react when they first laid eyes on an Native American brought over from the New World? What did the Greeks think when they first saw a Nubian? What went through the minds of the Chinese when the first European explorers turned up at their shores? For some, I’d imagine the feeling was something akin to first contact with an alien. I believe I mentioned Yasuke in a previous blog entry, but think about the account of his introduction to Japan. The Japanese were so flabbergasted by his appearance that he wound up before the emperor being washed to show that the color of his skin was real and not just paint. What a wonderous event Yasuke’s arrival must have been for those people.
With humans, the problems arise after those introductory events. Too often, instead of trying to build fruitful and mutually beneficial relationships with the new peoples we meet, we’ve instead chosen to conquer and exploit. Unfortunately, encounters between different groups of peoples in our history have seldom gone positively for both groups. We all understand that. That’s why it probably doesn’t surprise anyone that so many Sci-Fi stories featuring aliens also involve war or some other type of conflict.
That doesn’t dissuade us from wondering if we share this big universe with anyone else. Even in Swords-n-Spells type fantasy, the same concept shows up. My stories, for example, feature humans. However, the world in which my stories take place is also home to more than a dozen other races. Of course there are examples of interracial conflict and enmity in my stories, but I also like to show examples of interracial cooperation and amity. We need to believe the latter is, at least, a possibility. One day we might find that we’re not alone. I’m sure many are intrigued by and maybe even desire that possibility. In my opinion, it’s not enough to just want to meet other intelligent life. We should also hope that the meeting is amicable. That would be to our benefit. If we do run into another species that is able to cross the vast distances of space to reach us, we’d no doubt be on the vulnerable side of such a meeting. Let’s hope the results of first contact with people off the planet yields better results than the first contacts between the various peoples on the planet.
