I LIKE a moon mission as much as the next man, but even I thought the coverage of Artemis’s recent lunar trip was a bit excessive (Comment, 10 April; News, 17 April). Don’t misunderstand me. I am in awe of the physical, emotional, and technical strengths of astronauts who endure conditions that would reduce me to jelly. But I was also aware of how the coverage was essentially an antidote to all our other, somewhat grimmer, sublunary news.
Other headlines at the time told us about the escalating United States-Iran confrontation, the asphyxiated Straits of Hormuz, Israeli strikes on Lebanon, Russian strikes on Ukraine, rising oil prices, and a looming recession. We looked at the skies for a kind of escapism — indeed, for more than that: for a kind of salvation, a sign of what we humans can achieve and of the better angels of our nature.
We may be about to do so again. President Trump said recently that he was going to release government files on aliens and extraterrestrial life. In his defence (not a phrase that I often use), he was responding to comments made by Barack Obama about the existence of alien life. Mr Obama later clarified that he was talking about their statistical likelihood rather than any alleged spaceship in Area 51; but the online rumour mill does not need much to send it spinning.
Ever one to capitalise on social-media fantasies, President Trump posted on Truth Social that, on the basis of “the tremendous interest shown”, he will seek the release of files “related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and any and all other information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters”.
Given that alien life has not so far proved a significant issue in his presidency, one cannot help wonder whether he is using it for a different kind of salvation: an opportunity to distract public attention from his embarrassingly ill-thought-through attack on Iran and its growing economic impact.
IT IS often remarked that science fiction is really about the present rather than future, and these science stories are no exception. It is not that there isn’t a real subject worth discussing here, or that questions about alien life or space travel are always and merely a kind of cosmic Freudian projection. It is just that, much of the time, we look up as an alternative to looking around.
For what it’s worth, I think that Mr Obama is right. The likelihood of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe has been estimated by means of the Drake equation, formulated by the American astrophysicist Francis Drake in 1961. Although all the variables in the equation are all rough (and some are basically guesswork), the facts that (a) there are approximately 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone, and (b) there are vastly more solar-orbiting planets than we once thought, means that there are probably somewhere in the order of five billion potentially habitable planets in the Milky Way alone. With well over 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe, anyone can “do the math”. Life would have to be stupendously unlikely to overcome the sheer number of candidate planets ready to host it.
And yet there is always the so-called “Fermi paradox”, named after the Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi, to keep us sober. Fermi asked, simply, “If extra-terrestrials do exist, where is everybody?” It is a fair question. The result is that we are caught in a liminal space, boundaried by encouraging statistics on the one hand and perplexing silence on the other. It is a space just large enough to set our imagination free.
And so we project images from here on earth on to the skies. Some are inspiring. Into the silence we place ourselves, Apollo, Artemis, and Voyager proclaiming human intelligence and endurance and even, if we include the International Space Station, the kind of co-operation so often lacking on earth. Some are mystifying and conspiratorial, as with the perennial rumours about UFO sightings; some are straightforwardly terrifying: our subconscious fears transmuted into alien horrors.
It seems that, however modern we are, we look to the heavens to catch glimpses of ourselves. It is all very redolent of the familiar accusation that “man made God in his own image,” a line that, however polemical, has more than a whisper of truth about it. Whatever kind they are, our heavenly beings have a habit of looking a bit like us, reflecting our values or hopes or fears, only on a bigger scale. It seems as though we are hardwired to project a version of ourselves on to the canvas above us.
AND perhaps the canvas has space for only one projected being. It has long been received wisdom that discovery of intelligent life in the universe would present a (possibly insuperable) challenge to Christian faith. The cosmic perspective afforded by “the plurality of worlds” (as the issue was then known) would render “the Christian system of faith at once little and ridiculous”, the great deist Thomas Paine once argued.
I have written elsewhere about why this is not so. Indeed, the contrary seems to be true. Speculation about extraterrestrial life did not render Christianity little or ridiculous in the later Middle Ages, when it was far from uncommon. Theologians such as William Vorilong, Nicholas of Cusa, William of Ockham, Jean Buridan, and Nicole Oresme speculated, intelligently and often positively, about the prospect of alien life, a tradition ably continued today by the Revd Professor Andrew Davison at the University of Oxford in his fine book Astrobiology and Christian Doctrine (Books, 25 August 2023).
Belief in God did not preclude speculation about, and sometimes belief in, alien life. Indeed, it arguably provided a touchstone for it, permitting creative conjecture without its sliding into lurid, anthropocentric fantasy.
Maybe, if you already have some firm belief in intelligence “up there”, you are less in need to project your fears, hopes, and geopolitical needs on to that star-spangled screen. President Trump, take note.
Dr Nick Spencer is senior fellow at Theos. His books include Playing God: Science, religion and the future of humanity (Books, 22 March 2024).
Feature, Andrew Davison on the vastness of space prompting reflections on God for centuries