There was tremendous excitement in the scientific world last week with the discovery of some sort of echo of a shadow of a footprint of a fossil of a microbe from a few billion years ago on Mars. Extra-terrestrial life! This reminds me of a scene – I think from the film Poltergeist – when an investigator of the paranormal brags she once saw a kitchen utensil move a fraction of an inch in the absence of any apparent external agency. She then opens the door to a room which really is in dire need of an exorcism, and is dumbfounded to find all the cluttered contents flying around in a perfect maelstrom. I suppose the moral of the tale is that, if there really were something out there, we would know about it.
There are various theories as to why our satellite dishes have not, thus far, picked up any messages from afar. One is that intelligent beings from elsewhere have taken note of our predilection to violence, and have decided to have nothing to do with us. Who could blame them? Another theory is that the tendency to aggression is, literally, universal, and that all civilisations self-destruct before they develop the technology to venture substantial light years abroad. The universe is teeming with life, but incommunicado. I believe there is an equation that calculates the number of civilisations there are, based on the number of galaxies, the number of stars therein, and the number of orbiting planets inhabiting the “Goldilocks Zone”. The equation’s solution is a substantial number.
My gut instinct, not founded on any logical construct, but purely visceral, is that we are entirely alone. After all, we’ve been listening out for over a century now, across the wavelengths of fifteen billion light years.
Deafening silence.
Nary a cheap.
Probably just as well. At least the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary don’t need to worry about a steady influx of alien immigrants from Alpha Centauri, paying exorbitant fees to Masters of the Universe in order to board obsolete and gimcrack spacecraft, quite inadequate to the task of passing by Jupiter and through the asteroid belt. Stop the flying saucers!
I attended a funeral last week. Actually I attended two on consecutive days. I think it was Bernard Levin who confessed that he could not quite get used to the recurrent disappearing act of his friends. The funerals could not have been more unlike. The first was in Dunblane Cathedral, and was extremely high. We heard organ music by J. S. Bach, and Olivier Messiaen. First Corinthians Chapter 1 was read in 17th century prose in its entirety. The psalmody was austere.
The second was in a new crematorium to the north of Glasgow. The ceremony was entirely secular. The celebrant was very warm hearted. We heard Sinatra sing My Way, and Louis Armstrong, It’s a Wonderful Life. Both ceremonies were very enriching, and the “afterwards” heart-warming. Lovely purvey.
I’m a Glaswegian, but Glasgow is notoriously territorial, and you do not need to venture far in the city to get lost. (Fortunately I had sat-nav, even if it did let me down in the end. “You have reached your destination. It is on the right.” On my right was a field. I had to ask a passer-by. The crematorium was several fields to the north. Close, but no cigar.) Anyway I found myself driving north up Springburn Road in the direction of Bishopbriggs. Through a working class area, mile after mile, the street lampposts carried saltires. This had nothing to do with Scottish Nationalism, and everything to do with migrants and asylum seekers. The rhetoric on social media is daily becoming more intemperate. It is no longer “stop the boats”, but “sink the boats”. And much worse than that.
I dare say the saltires were being unfurled by the extreme right, but flying a flag is a bit like flying a kite. Or like publishing a book. Once it’s out there in the public domain, you no longer have any control over its meaning and purport. The words may be your intellectual property, but the ideas are up for grabs. The flags were positioned halfway up the lampposts, presumably because this was as far as the ladders would extend. But it gave the impression of an array of saltires all flying at half-mast. We were therefore in a state of mourning. The flag is lowered to half-mast in order to give precedence to the death flag, which, while invisible, is there.
I suppose the two contrasting funerals served to emphasise two different ways of looking at the world, and the universe; the sacred way, and the secular way. We may search for an underlying meaning, and purpose, to our lives; or we may say that life is inherently meaningless or, as Albert Camus might have said, absurd. That same dichotomy comes up when we contemplate our position in the vastness of space-time. We may ask, if we on this tiny blue speck are entirely alone, what could that possibly mean? Or we may say that the very question is meaningless, and absurd. Sometimes I have the feeling that deep space, and deep time, are merely an illusion. Maybe the Spanish Inquisition had it right all along. We really are, contrary to expectation, at the centre of the universe. But then again, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.
But I can’t get terribly exercised about these deep philosophical questions. Maybe it’s a lack of imagination on my part, but they don’t bother me. It is the human condition to see everything through a glass darkly. Doubt is, of itself, an article of faith. I suppose I found some sort of resolution on Sunday evening, playing my viola in Stirling, in concert in The Church of the Holy Rude. The acoustic was very forgiving. I had a short solo. It rang out across the tremendous space. I said to the conductor afterwards, “Gosh, what a sound. Was that me?” She laughed and said, “Yes, it was you.”
jamescalumcampbell 