Page 69 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire

Ark Two

understanding of astrophysics to supposed conundrums and crises
already acknowledged by the public mind as worthy of attention,
giving them his own special spin. Quite a bit of interest was
generated a few years ago by the “search for extraterrestrial
intelligence,” a possibility dangling tantalizingly at the end of a chain
of probabilities based on imputed numbers of life-supporting Terra-
like worlds out there in space and the further highly-cooked odds of
any of them developing creatures capable of broadcasting
meretricious entertainment into the ether at wavelengths we could
ingeniously infer. That open-ended project soldiers bravely on to
disprove a negative: no evidence at all has been found of such aliens,
but the radio telescopes and computers keep at it around the clock.
Naturally, the current combination of an age of technological
advancement with an eon of psychological retardation has fed the
popular belief in alien abductions of humans for experiments worthy
of Doctor Mengele, ancient visitations by little green men leaving
behind the secrets of the universe encoded in esoteric rock
formations, and the unfortunate sublimation of nuclear anxiety in
paranoid cinematic fantasies of war with gigantic insects or robots.
Those sensationalized distortions of the galactic facts of life, often
dovetailing with humanity’s refusal to confront the existential
isolation and obvious rarity of Earth and its biosphere, had an
analogue among the higher-brow set in notions of exogenesis and
panspermia. In a more intellectual version of televangelism’s rear-
guard defense of the Old Testament as literal truth, these semi-
respectable crackpots rejected the demonstrable formation of amino
acids in the primordial soup in favor of a universal deep-space
dispersion of genetic material, deliberate or not, seeding any planet it
happened to encounter in planting season. That left open the
possibility of some external agency responsible for our existence, no
matter how remote and disinterested; thus theology reappeared—not
for the first time—draped in academic rather than liturgical gowns,
and the public had to deal with another supposition impossible to
disprove except by deft wielding of Occam’s razor.
All that was of no import to me. Cosmology and cosmogony were
not burning issues in my circumscribed selfish life. But I had to
appear a bit conversant in order to relate to Vosky, for he had already
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