The Call is Coming from Inside the House

The fundamental question, of course, is: Are we alone?

It's fundamental because of it's multifaceted applications. It fits in the scene in the horror movie a few music-less seconds before the guy with half a face and a power tool for a hand jumps out of a closet. It works with throaty mock surprise for a randy couple finally ensconced behind a closed door. It's appropriate in the middle of the woods at dusk when distracted campers realize the rest of their church group nature outing has disappeared into the trees without taking a thorough head count. It's the appropriate panicked address to one's self-stimulated genitals when you hear a door open in another room of what was supposed to be an empty house.

The implications are broad, yet highly context-specific. No one is going to mix any of those two uses up, one hopes. It's all about tone and situational relevance, of course. Normally, however, that particular question, "Are we alone?" usually evokes the existential/philosophical/astronomical mystery of the potential of extraterrestrial life.

Mathematically speaking, the question just about answers itself: of course not. It doesn't make any sense that in all the wide, expanding universe, that nowhere else at any time have the conditions existed on any planet to produce something else somewhere that breathes, eats, fucks and shits. I don't know if it's obvious yet or not, but I was able to graduate high school and obtain two separate university degrees and take exactly zero biology classes, so I don't know exactly if those are the xenobiological criteria for determining what constitutes "life," but I feel like the sentiment more or less ballparks it. It is only a coincidence that these same four criteria would also qualify the as-yet undiscovered life form for his/her/its own reality television show.

I've never really understood the basic framework for the search for life. Every time a new planet is discovered circling some wobbly smudge of light umpty-zillion miles away, the question immediately applied is whether or not it exists in the so-called "Goldilocks zone," which, if I remember the fairy tale correctly, has something to do with unlawful entry, food theft, vandalism and squatting. The exact way the metaphor applies is lost on me, I admit, but the upshot is: is the planet the right temperature to support liquid water and therefore the conditions to produce and sustain squishy carbon-based organism such as ourselves?

Our fascination with so-called extremophiles has allowed us to broaden our criteria somewhat as we keep accidentally finding life thriving in what used to be thought of as the unlikeliest of places, but it's turning out that that, at least on earth, there are almost no environments that aren't also habitats.

Based on this, and keeping in mind what I've already said about my formal training in this realm, I've decided I'm going to Fix Science by making a simple and obvious observation: life is fucking everywhere. Just assume it's on every planet. In every crevice and crack, every peak and valley, every moon and dust cloud, in sunbeams and interstellar space. Assuming that any "life" we find would have to conform to the uninteresting confluence of bullshit occurrences that led to us being manufactured by our former interstellar colonial overlords just lacks imagination. Why would it have to look like us? Or better: why would we want it to look like us? Is that what we want? More people, but from someplace else? Aren't those always the worst kinds of people? Well, I guess those are the second worst people, right after the people all around you all the time. The ones cooking with what can only be vinegar and galvanized rubber in the downstairs apartment or listening to Armenian banjo dirges at 4 in the morning or gumming up the cable internet so it takes you five hours to download your Taiwanese bootleg copy of Aces: Iron Eagle III for free. Those people are clearly assholes.

But look, we're spending so much time and energy trying to make all extraterrestrial life be just like us. It's a failure of imagination, first of all. And it's really expensive and time consuming to find perfect planets with the same meticulous effort it would take us to find an individual sugar crystal on a white-sand beach. If we were to stop looking, it wouldn't be giving up. It would be because we'd just agreed to decide we'd succeeded. We (most likely) found extraterrestrial life. We (probably) are not alone. It's (within the acceptable statistical margin of error) all around us, all the time. It's possible to accept it without having to seek it out or (my God, so much worse) invite it over.