One night last week I spent a few cold seconds outside on the deck wearing only a bathrobe. It was 3 a.m. The temperature was in the twenties. Fog hovered at rooftop level, which was unfortunate.
I was out there to see if the Northern Lights would live up to a solar weather forecast, but I could only see a vague glow on the north end of the valley. It might have been moonlight. It might have been a pickup coming around the bend just below the Sawtooth Fish Hatchery.
I ducked back into the house, shivering. I had promised to wake Julie if there was any kind of spectacle, but she was sleeping soundly. I knew she wouldn’t take kindly to being awakened, even if the Northern Lights had been making like a light show at a Pink Floyd concert.
I also knew that I wasn’t going to be able to sleep for awhile, so I grabbed a book and reading glasses and a pillow and headed for the couch in the living room. I put wood on the fire and pulled a blanket off the top of the couch and settled in to read for an hour or two.
The book I was reading was Hatred, by Willard Gaylin, a psychiatrist who made a career of dealing with troubled, angry, paranoid people. Gaylin traced the development of hatred from envy, insecurity, anger, and fear into paranoia and rage, and thence into torture, murder, suicide bombings, and genocide. Gaylin makes a convincing case that any human being can get caught up in a step-by-step process that starts with a childlike innocence and ends with evil. Lynndie England can go from a homely picked-on high school girl who wanted to be a meteorologist to the Iraq War’s grinning poster child for sadism.
When Julie discovered I was reading Hatred at bedtime, she asked, “Why are you filling your brain with that stuff right before you go to sleep? No wonder you wake up at 3 a.m.”
I replied that hatred had lately become a pressing Idaho problem. It isn’t just school board meetings being cancelled by angry anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers. It’s the big, black 4-wheel-drive pickups that have occupied Sawtooth Valley this year, most of them with guns showing, some with Confederate flag appliques on their rear windows and Fuck Biden bumper stickers. It’s an Idaho legislature that encourages open carry by people who are openly angry.
It’s also the campaign for lieutenant governor by Priscilla Giddings, the Idaho legislator who doxxed a 19-year-old intern who accused Aaron von Ehlinger, a Lewiston, Idaho representative, of raping her. Giddings put the intern’s name and image on her website and accused the girl of being a “honey trap.” Giddings is an exponent of personal freedom, but it looks like she’s talking about the freedom to destroy people.
“Idahoans are starting to hate each other,” I told Julie. “They’re picking sides for civil war.”
“Maybe you should just stop watching the news,” Julie said.
Civil war in Idaho did not keep me awake long. It distracted me from the big worry I had started thinking about when I was looking for Northern Lights: Fermi’s Paradox. Briefly put, Fermi’s Paradox supports the idea that any industrial civilization will destroy itself by rendering its biosphere unlivable.
The reason that we aren’t picking up alien radio transmissions is because the time that a civilization can receive and transmit radio messages is, in cosmic terms, too brief to bother about. Maybe Tau Ceti once had radio telescopes that could pick up our message from 12 light-years away, but if they did they’re all dead now. Or maybe they will have those radio telescopes in the future, but we’ll all be dead by the time they get around to building them. The odds of Tau Ceti and Sol having radio astronomy at the same time are astronomically small.
Human evil, put up against the vastness of time and space, looks like a tiny local problem, one that will solve itself. You can imagine Gaia saying to herself, “No more humans, no more evil,” and picking up the phone, where she’s got the laws of physics on speed-dial.
I read a few pages of Hatred and awoke a couple of hours later with the book open on my chest and my reading glasses still on. I went back to bed and didn’t wake up until daylight, which, as daylight savings time was still in effect, constituted a blissful sleeping in.
The Northern Lights are caused by solar storms sending flares into the magnetic field of the earth. Unless the storm is a monster, the magnetic field directs the ionized plasma in those flares to the atmosphere over Earth’s poles. It keeps those ions from becoming too intense for life to exist on earth.
Every 300,000 years or so Earth’s magnetic field flips polarity and gets weak enough to allow auroras at mid-latitudes, along with lethal ionizing radiation. Occasionally a solar storm is so big that if it were to hit us, it would overwhelm the magnetic field and wipe out power grids and computer chips across half the planet, or all of it, depending on how long it lasted.
We could have it worse. Astronomers have determined that the closest star to our sun, Proxima Centauri, has a planet in its habitable zone, the distance from the star where a planet could have liquid water on its surface. But Proxima Centauri is a flare star, one that sporadically puts out eruptions bigger than any effort we’ve seen Sol muster. The planet is so close to its star (four-and-a-half million miles, compared to Earth’s ninety-three) that to host what we know as life, it would have to have a huge magnetic field or a thick atmosphere and a deep ocean on its surface.
Proxima Centauri is too close to its planet, habitable zone or not. Flares will strip the planet of the thickest atmosphere over a billion years, so if it isn’t already an airless, waterless, inert chunk of rock, it will be.
If the planet has life, it almost certainly doesn’t have a civilization. It’s also about 25 trillion miles from us, so even if it did have a civilization, the Proxima Centaurs would face the technical difficulty of exceeding the speed of light if they wanted to avoid a centuries-long trip. Chances are by the time they got here, humanity wouldn’t be here to greet them.
That said, lots of people believe that aliens live among us, and they’re not thinking of Canadians who crossed the border to get rich in our medical-industrial complex. They’re thinking of lizards zipped into lifelike rubber suits cleverly crafted to look like recently deceased celebrities. They’re thinking of gray-skinned meanies who abduct people for involuntary colonoscopies and exploratory surgeries. They’re thinking of semi-benign Galactic Empires that have quarantined Earth until its current civilization blows itself up, at which point they will rescue all surviving vegetarian humans. They’re thinking of evil, cold, unamused intelligences staring out at us from the eyes of house cats.
It’s not uncommon for people to hear alien voices telling them to think filthy thoughts, or to collect their nail clippings in Mason jars, or to announce to media outlets that the moon landings were conducted by Stanley Kubrick in a Hollywood studio. The voices confide that John Kennedy, Jr. disappeared into an alien underwater city on his way to Martha’s Vineyard, and he will appear, when the time is right, to lead his followers to rapture in Dealey Plaza. Also, the pyramids were levitated into place. And humans fight wars in the alien equivalent of cockfighting. And aliens are artificial intelligences, and they’re taking over Earth at this very moment.
If aliens are a phalanx of artificial intelligences, I wish they’d start working on the problem of human evil. Otherwise, I’m going to start questioning their artificial ethics. If they are here, and if they do care enough to influence humans one way or another, why not tell humans to help each other? If they’re so smart, why can’t they increase the amount of good in the world?
I believe that aliens are out there. Lots of them. It’s a big universe, maybe an infinite one, and my high school biology book, in a surprisingly philosophical afterword, suggested that life itself might be the Fourth Law of Thermodynamics, a self-organizing system that appears, temporarily, to be anti-entropic.
My biology book suggested that life would start anywhere there is liquid water, the right combination of minerals, and just the right amount of electromagnetic radiation. Once it gets started, natural selection will do the rest. After a billion years or so, life has a good chance of evolving into intelligent hominids in the midst of an industrial revolution.
So, in that cheery scenario, on a myriad of distant planets aliens are producing objects that look a lot like bullet blenders, pickups, Picassos, trailer houses, corkscrews, computers, stock markets, steel rolling mills, smartphones, and nuclear bombs. If they’re a bit more advanced than we are, they’re launching interstellar objects like ’Oumuamua (“scout” or “messenger” in Hawaiian) that shot into and out of our solar system in 2017.
But I don’t believe aliens would waste the time or resources required to visit us in person. Any civilization advanced enough to visit another star would be advanced enough to get anything it wanted, save scientific knowledge, from its own solar system. It would have finessed the lethal problems of war and climate alteration and exponential-growth capitalism. Evil would have been met and mastered.
Those aliens wouldn’t have much to learn from us.
It’s possible that such an alien civilization would recall having religious and political rage, envy, sloth, avarice, pride, gluttony, and lust. Also civil wars, rapists, biological-nuclear-chemical weapons, paranoia, and legislators doxxing interns. They might, out of the goodness of their hearts (assuming they have hearts) send a message to a poor benighted planet out on the galaxy’s arm, revealing to us not the secret of faster-than-light travel (they would have brains), but the formula for a civilization that wouldn’t destroy its planet or kill itself with hatred. Such a formula would transform rage into love, violence into community, resource extraction into resource sustainability.
I don’t think the aliens’ message would be broadcast via radio. It might come through the mysteries of quantum-level consciousness, and we’re a long way from figuring out how that might work.
If such a message ever flashed into the consciousness of a human of this planet, it’s been forgotten. If it came tomorrow, I’m pretty sure it would be ignored, at least on the chunk of the planet called Idaho, which seems prepared to enact the dark side of Fermi’s Paradox all by itself.
Every time I get a fundraising email from Priscilla Giddings, I look at its burden of anger and its accusations that her rivals for the office of lieutenant governor are corrupt, dirty, lying, tax-and-spend swamp dwellers, and I see a good many of the deepening obsessions that I read about in Hatred.
I think of the 19-year-old Idaho legislative intern, who must have gone into her job with good will and excitement and hope for a future in politics, only to be accused of false witness when she reported her rape to police. I don’t think that intern has much of a future in politics anymore, and even less of a past.
I’ve thought of writing Priscilla Giddings a letter saying that self-inflicted spiritual wounds rarely heal, at least while we’re still alive, and that somewhere in her life journey she’ll look back at her actions and decide that the lieutenant governor’s office and whatever followed it weren’t worth damaging the people she had to damage to get there.
Then I realize I don’t know what wounds Priscilla Giddings herself bears that have filled her so full of rage and its toxic byproducts. Then I think if she sees my letter, she’ll ignore it. Then I think that she has people who screen her mail for the slightest criticism of her ethics.
So I won’t write her. I won’t send her a check, either, even though I’m pretty sure the nastiest thing I could do is help her get what she wants. Whatever the Alien Grays might do with their tubes and scalpels would be insignificant compared to what her fellow Republicans have in mind for her if she wins her election.
Besides, I have bigger things to worry about at 3 a.m.