Are aliens just a projection of our subconscious?

 

Is it egocentric to believe in aliens?

Our planet is peopled by thinking creatures, therefore we imagine the same of other planets. Aliens have been typically reported to have two legs and two arms and an overlarge head and eyes, a tiny mouth, no hair. They look like a cross between a fetus and a skeleton which has lost some of our organic properties: they don't look like they would sweat or bleed.

They could be analyzed as a product of our subconscious, and of our fascination with forms that are nearly human: ghosts, zombies, severed limbs all linger on the boundaries of humanity. Such constructs challenge our perception of what it means to be human and alive, and tend to inspire us with terror. What happens to “me” when I die, besides putrefying, and where was I before I was born? 

Is my body me?

Whether we believe in an afterlife or not, our body becomes separated from our soul, intelligence, consciousness, emotions, once we die. Whatever happens to everything else, our body decays after our death, and that's awful. It becomes alien. The ovule fecundated by a spermatozoid also lacks consciousness, and emotions, and intelligence, if not soul according to some religions.

And is my hand, severed, still me? And is that photo of my stomach's endoscopy a representation of “me”? It seems that in our guts, in our entrails, death and putrefaction loom more menacingly than in our external appearance that defines us as humans. After all, our pancreas does not differ much from a bat's. 

The mystery of our boundaries (interior/exterior, dead/alive, whole/divided, psychical/physical) informs all horror films, Alien and its skinless creatures come to mind. These are different from reported images of aliens. ETs are described as being inorganic by people who claim to have seen them, while creatures imagined to provoke terror are ultra organic. 

If aliens look like fetuses, do UFOs look like our rockets?

As humans we tend to project our own essence and it's hard for us to imagine something really different. Reports of UFOs are suspiciously close to our own technology: a flying saucer is a metal rocket that projects light, only round instead of elongated.

It is remarkable that their name and shape refer to a container of food -think breast- that crosses the sky in a circular movement. Our technology is mostly inspired by the phallus (rockets, racing cars, skyscrapers, gas pumps, syringes, plugs). Aliens as a fantasy of femaleness?

Or a suppression of masculinity as portrayed stereotypically: aliens have no body hair, no muscle mass, and no erections for sure. They're movable brains.

An appealing theory has it that aliens planted Amanita muscaria on the Earth. People who have sampled this toxic mushroom (carefully enough to be able to tell the tale: I do not recommend trying this) have had out-of-body experiences. Some had the impression they floated way, way above the Earth and explored the cosmos. 

Aliens would have given us this way of experiencing the outer world rather than by physical means. While I know this is sweet folklore, the concept implies that aliens might transport themselves, or communicate using completely different means from us. No metal, no fuel, no electromagnetic waves.

Is there life on other planets that is not particularly intelligent?

To go back to alien intelligent life, we could imagine there is life on other planets that is not particularly intelligent. The creatures, deer-like, would lead gentle, unremarkable lives that do not necessitate the development of thinking. It is meditative to imagine a planet without wars, without facebook, without famines nor obesity.

I let myself dream of Planet Earth where Man would never have happened: a kind of paradise with huge areas of savannah, rain forest, ice pack, taiga, tundra, all pristine. Rhinoceros, unconcerned about the value of their horns, roam freely. Whales swim with no threatening boat in sight. Dodos only have to worry about their next meal.

Does evolution necessarily lead to the development of intelligence?

But life without intelligence doesn't actually make sense for a system in the long term. If life appears on a planet, if from an inert environment, something alive (and what is alive? Basically something that is complex and can die if that complexity is destroyed. When we die, our complex bodies get taken over by bacteria that is a less organized form) happens, it's going to evolve. Complex creatures are not going to just happen, ta-da, from one day to the next. That's if we take a scientific point of view, and not mythological!

If there is evolution from simple to more complex, then intelligence is going to give select creatures a massive edge as it has on our planet, and is bound to happen eventually. It could be that one planet hosts more than one species with intelligence, like we had Neanderthal, and Homo floresiensis at some point, and gosh, I really miss them.

Could a planet be inhabited with just one big jelly?

The alternative to this scenario is a planet where there is just one entity. Maybe something like a mycelium. This organism is not in competition with anything else, but works and evolves cooperatively. I imagine a kind of cloud that moves like a huge sea creature, a bit foamy perhaps, that changes color, and changes shapes. It might not need to develop intelligence, but then again it might as it morphs and expands and needs to use different resources.

I like to think that the intelligence of this organism is wise, because it does not know competition, conflict, violence. And maybe it could impart some of its wisdom to us by finding a way to communicate: stay tuned. We'd stop killing each other, and trying to outdo our neighbors, and to own more and more and more than we need, to leave less and less resources to others, like who needs to possess 165 billion dollars when we could share the planet in peace and justice?

Written fast and furiously by  - -  Arabella von Arx

All images from wikimedia commons.

The Thread: A Prologue

Below is the prologue to a project part memoir, part historical fiction, The Thread: 

Inspired by Helen Schjerfbeck

Inspired by Remedios Varos

We were the only family that ate corn on the cob and celebrated Christmas on the 25^th of December instead of the 24^th. We didn’t know the simple explanation to these peculiarities: our mother was American. One day, long before she came to Switzerland, she had taken a machete and cut her life in two. Did she open this gash over one day? A month ? A year ? My father, who met her when she was 20, knew little more than we did. She had already changed her name, did not see any of her family nor any childhood friend. She did not write to them, did not speak to them, did not discuss. Thus we knew her, born at twenty, all questions about her past taboo. This code of silence existed before I, the youngest of the family, started asking questions. Even friends of my parents seemed to be aware of the taboo and respected it.

“She must come from Britain because she speaks English and often travels alone to London. “ we whispered during one of our secret conferences. She sent us beautiful postcards from the British Museum, with sweet words that failed to touch us as her absence seemed further proof of her aloofness.

“She must have lived near the sea, as she talked about picnics at the beach. “ Reported my sister. “She mentioned a nanny. “I added. “ She didn’t. “ “ Yes, she did. “ I imagined a large Victorian house, a bit run down, near windswept dunes covered with brambles. And behind the shutters of the villa, the great secret, the deep mystery that was hidden from our sight. If she made any allusion to the past, we would freeze and pretend casualness, in the hope that, oblivious to our presence, she would inadvertently slip into confidences.

The day of the revelation, we sat at regular intervals around my mother, hearts pounding. The living room looked reticent now that I didn’t live home anymore. I wasn’t so sure I wanted to know, I was frightened. She started speaking, without much preamble.

‘I went to the embassy in Geneva to look up my last name in the phone book. I found my brother’s phone number. When I called a man answered. I didn’t know who he was.

“I’d like to speak to Vincent.”

“He’s not here. Who’s calling?”

 “His sister. Who are you?”

“His father.”

A childhood can not be restored in one or two hours. This narrative of her past would normally have been built over time by what our childhood terribly missed: by hearing touching and humorous anecdotes, stories from the grandmother we never met, looking at family photographs together, visiting relatives. We asked a few questions, as if stroking cautiously an unpredictable cat. She answered, describing the harrowing events that led her to cut all ties with her family in a manner as devoid of emotion as a notary reading one more will.

Inspired by Ana Mendieta

The burden of suffering which my mother had shed became mine. I filled not just with my mother’s pain, but her mother’s as well, and that of all her little brothers and sisters’, rippling down the generations. The only way to drain the overflowing vault was through the valve of my imagination. I began to make up the missing episodes in my mother’s life, and in her mother’s. Then I went back to my great-grandmother, the famous Lietta, who seemed the source of all our calamities. This emotional monster, what could she have gone through in her childhood? I had no reason to stop, and beyond this cruel grandmother, I went to listen to the story of each woman who miraculously gave birth to a girl who then in turn became a mother, a long meandering thread over the centuries, saved against all odds from being cut down by nature and men. I followed it back to the time when a handful of thinkers on their peninsula decided the important facts to remember would not be desires, births, jealousy, vanity, rape. Instead they came up with a discipline that would only record political events, thus excluding women’s memory: History was born.

To read the first story of 100 women talk to their daughters over 2500 years, click here.

All illustrations original works by Arabella Hutter, as are the texts.