The aliens I’ve been writing about for the last several years make an appearance on Necessary Fiction this week. These are the same beings that appeared in Interzone 2012 in my story “Wonder,” and they’ll be making another appearance in another story soon in Arc from New Scientist. I’ve been writing about these Blues, as I call them, for long enough that I’ve honestly forgotten how or why I came to them. Perhaps they came down to me. What I do remember is thinking to myself, back in early 2011, I will write a YA novel, I will write a YA novel, I will write a YA novel, and then, years later, looking up for the computer and realizing I have neither a novel nor anything YA, but instead this epic of interconnected adult stories, some speculative, some not, that will in the end span several hundred years and circle around themes of belief and faith. I’m maybe 60% done.  

I’ve been obsessively reading about faith for about 15 years now, ever since I fell in love with medieval saints and desert fathers while studying history at Carleton College for my undergrad degree. Aliens entered somewhat later, but I’ve been reading about them too for a time, and one of the books I’ve enjoyed the most is The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Inteligence by astrobiologist Paul Davies, a book which manages, among other things, to tie faith & aliens convincingly together in a few pages near the end. The entire book is an ultra-intelligent, fascinating, and often entertaining read even for the alien non-obsessed (though perhaps don’t listen to it while driving on toll roads in the dark, as my husband did…it put him to sleep). I’ll quote from it at length below because I thought the following section beautifully captured why the search for aliens is similar to a search for God (finding proof of both would be miraculous, wouldn’t it?) (I happen to be searching for proof right now) (but even without proof I still find it necessary to believe in them, in both aliens and God) (or else if this is all life is?) (there has to be more). 

“Humans have a basic need to perceive themselves as part of a grand scheme, of a natural order that has a deeper significance and greater endurance than the petty affairs of daily life. The incongruous mismatch between the futility of the human condition and the brooding majesty of the cosmos compels people to seek a transcendent meaning to underpin their fragile existence. For thousands of years this broader context was provided by tribal mythology and storytelling. The transporting qualities of those narratives gave human beings a crucial spiritual anchor. All cultures lay claim to haunting myths of otherworldliness: from the Dreaming of the Australian Aborigines to the Chronicles of Narnia, from the Nirvana of Buddhism to the Christian Kingdom of Heaven. Over time, the humble campfire stories morphed into the splendour and ritual of organized religion and the great works of drama and literature. Even in our secular age, where many societies have evolved to a post-religious phase, people still have unfulfilled spiritual yearnings. A project with the scope and profundity of SETI cannot be divorced from this wider cultural context, for it too offers us the vision of a world transformed, and holds the compelling promise that this could happen any day soon. As the writer David Brin has pointed out, ‘contact with advanced alien civilizations may carry much the same transcendental or hopeful significance as any more traditional notion of “salvation from above”.’  I have argued that if we did make contact with an advanced extraterrestrial community, the entities with which we would be dealing would approach godlike status in our eyes. Certainly they would be more godlike than human-like; indeed, their powers would be greater than those attributed to most gods in human history.”

“So is SETI itself in danger of becoming a latter-day religion? The science fiction writer Michael Crichton thought so. ‘SETI is unquestionably a religion,’ he said bluntly, in a 2003 speech at the California Institute of Technology. Crichton was objecting to the widespread use of the Drake equation when many of the terms it includes are pure guesses. ‘Faith is defined as the firm belief in something for which there is no proof,’ he explained. ‘The belief that there are other life forms in the universe is a matter of faith. There is not a single shred of evidence for any other life forms, and in forty years of searching, none has been discovered. There is absolutely no evidentiary reason to maintain this belief.’ In similar vein, George Basalla, a University of Delaware historian, argues that doggedly pursuing contact with aliens in the face of fifty years of silence betrays a kind of religious fervour, bolstered by a vestige of the belief that the heavens are populated by superior beings. The writer Margaret Wertheim has studied how the concept of space and its inhabitants has evolved over several centuries. She traces the modern notion of aliens to Renaissance writers such as the Roman Catholic Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (1401–64), who considered the status of man in the universe in relation to celestial beings such as angels. ‘Historically, this may be seen as the first step in a process that would culminate in the modern idea of aliens,’ writes Wertheim. ‘What are ET and his ilk, after all, if not incarnated angels – beings from the stars made manifest in flesh?’”

–The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Inteligence, Paul Davies