little gREEn meN
We are undeniably in an information renaissance and it can get a little bit crowded on the internet. It’s filled with informative stories, some factual, some useless and for those inclined to conspiracy persuasion; it’s a galactic super highway...
I came across an interesting story about a two men and an ambitious quest. Entrepreneur Yuri Milner and world renowned physicist Stephen Hawking are teaming up. Their mission is simple, to seek out and search for extraterrestrial life in the next 10 years. The bill has a 100 million dollar price tag, so yes it seems they’re very serious. Not only that, they have an all star team of researchers and state of the art technology to make their effort potentially a success... Exciting?
It was 1938 and the infamous Orson Welles radio broadcast The War of the Worlds hit the airwaves. On a cold October night radio listeners gathered in their living rooms and
heard something so unbelievable they believed it.
The story is compellingly terrifying and if you were one of the many listeners that night; you too would’ve been very afraid. So how can something so out of this world be mistaken as factual? The broadcast was produced in many ways like a news bulletin of the day. To make it all more authentically real, no commercial breaks were made for the entirety of the broadcast; which ran just a little under 90 minutes. It was horrifyingly brilliant. People went absolutely bananas and not in a good way.
A terrifying story pegged as reality will no doubt have imminent consequences, on a naive audience. And of course we can be sympathetic to a degree but aren’t we so fragile; us humans? The line between order and chaos is as fine as the air we breathe. In an instant civility becomes all out anarchy and chaos. What if Milner and Hawking are successful in their search for intelligent life, will people’s heads explode? Will everything we hold dear and believe in vanish? Will the world stop and everything in it mean less? Will your existence lack any importance? Yes indeed those are some loaded questions and difficult to answer, but what would happen? Are we ready and can we even fathom the thought? Some people would argue we should fix the problems we have here on Earth before we go on trekking for problems on other planets. 100 million dollars can fix many human problems. But maybe that’s just it; maybe that’s the price of inspiring and awakening the world to become better.
If we discovered intelligent life and the opportunity for first contact arose, wouldn’t we want them to meet the best version of ourselves, much like a first impression on a date? If I was them looking at us today, I might be under the assumption that the Kardashian’s have rule over our planet, Kim being world president and that Miley Cyrus is the pope and the center of all things spiritual...Fair assumption?
Stories like this always inspire me. Faced with incredible odds people of the good Earth are willing to take chances and do the things that are impossible. When we step and look outside our world we begin to see just how small we really are; and it’s in this veil of awareness we can appreciate that it's always in the littlest of ways, we find unity.
No matter where on Earth or cosmic postal code we come from, there is a unifying truth. We are but one small part of an enormous wonderful work of art, to which we belong and share... Grow old and wise my fellow humans, become better. If little gREEn meN are out there, they've been just as much as we've been out here, sharing this wonderful universe together.
