Why Are They Always Acting Like Bad Humans?

I was browsing around the vast pool of Web knowledge about aliens the other day and I was struck by how awful we humans think aliens are.  Judging by how they’re portrayed in the popular media, it would seem that they are everything we’d like to think we as human beings are NOT. Yet, look at some recent alien descriptions:  mean-spirited, interested in empire building, rapacious, godlike, superintelligent but with the moral development of a flea, overly interested in probing people’s rear ends with strange devices, and occasionally (VERY occasionally, almost to the point of rarity) benevolent. I mean, this all sounds remarkably like some familiar human behavior. In fact, I’ve read similar descriptions of deities, too. Just look at all the portrayals of Mars, the God of War, to see how we also program the gods we worship with some similar, not always pleasant, human traits.

So, why are these “other than human” beings so nasty?  What is it about aliens that have led humans to ascribe the worst of the very human traits to them?  I think it’s psychological, really.  We are hard-wired to ascribe nasty traits to things that we fear, and that includes any possible aliens that might come sailing our way from the planet Promixus Prime or wherever. It probably is wired into that reptilian part of our brains that helps us remain alert to the unusual and sudden events in our lives.

Of course, there’s no proof yet that aliens exist — except in our imaginations. Not one has landed on Earth to give us a friendly “Howdy, neighbor” greeting; at least, none that we know of. And, there’s little to no proof that any have come here. Sure, there’s lots of speculation, but hard scientific proof of alien life just doesn’t exist yet.

There’s certainly plenty of evidence that other planets MAY be able to support life, and in the case of Mars, it may have supported life in the past. But that life was (if it existed), largely the size and complexity of bacteria. Not tentacled life forms or little green men or greys or Pleiadians or whatever else it is that imaginative humans have dreamed up for Mars.  It was likely bacteria. And the same may well be true of other planets with conditions right for life.

It’s tough to imagine a single-celled life form raising up on its tentacles and proclaiming its dominion over the Earth, but you know what? There is one — called bacteriophages. They ARE the most abundant forms of life on our planet. Most of them are not harmful to us, but of course a subset are. If you catch a sinus infection or get an infected cut, you are being overcome by another life form. However, bacteriophages aren’t alien either. And, your gut (and many other animals’ guts) are filled with bacteria that help you digest food.   Those are the “good guy” bacteria. They evolved here on Earth, too, and as far as we know, didn’t come from somewhere else.

The building blocks of life did come from somewhere else — but not other alien worlds. The chemical elements that make up life came from stars that exploded and died and sent their elements out to space. Over time, those elements combined to make molecules, which were incorporated into new generations of stars and planets.  And,  those elements eventually became available for the chemical formation of life on our planet.

They weren’t scattered here by roving alien life forms — that explanation requires too many “what ifs” and concocted scenarios to work; especially when stardeath and starbirth are very much more ubiquitous throughout the galaxy.  Those are much more commonly occurring processes that we can detect and measure. And, we can trace the elements from stars to the elements that help our blood carry oxygen to our brains, and so forth.  There’s a whole science of astrobiology that helps us understand and trace the process of life creation from the elements available in each neighborhood of the galaxy.  That science will help us understand life elsewhere when it is discovered, and most  likely, it will be simple life forms, not the complex monsters we’ve brought up straight from the realm of our worst nightmares (as I wrote in a fulldome planetarium show called MarsQuest ).

No, I’m pretty sure that the aliens we fear the most — the ones we see in movies like “Alien” and on “Star Trek” and in countless science fiction novels featuring flesh-eating monsters and three-legged green dudes who carry off our women and furry creatures that have inspired a whole subset of fans and many others — all those likely exist in our own brains, created by our fertile imaginations and inspired from below by that reptile brain.  We are an imaginative bunch of alien creators!