Stars

Fresh from another tension-filled episode of Law and Order: SVU and I'm feeling restless again. It's been a relatively stress-free week so far, but that may be due in part to the fact that I've been rather naughtily putting things off. Bad habit that I've never really been able to shake, actually. There are course outlines to write, notes to draft, DVDs to review and games to finish but I just don't feel like doing anything. This is when I thank God for books, and the one that I've been reading this past week has certainly sparked a lot of activity in my cranium (well aside from trying to pin down for certain whether looking at Lindsay Lohan's boob slips is legal or not).

I watched Contact (the one with Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey) when it came out years ago, and though I thought the general idea of the film was cool, I felt that the movie seemed kind of rushed. Having almost finished the novel, I now know I was right. There are far too many things to be explained than can be done effectively in a two hour movie. I grabbed the slightly dogeared paperback at the neighborhood Books For Less for exactly 7 bucks to read during the train ride to Singapore, and it's been drawing me in ever since (and I never thought reading Carl Sagan would be so..satisfying). It's a complex book, and one that tries to tackle issues we've all had trouble with sometimes: religion and science, are we alone in the universe, who lives in a pineapple under the sea...you know, things like that.

Like any geeky teen growing up on a steady diet of 80's pop culture (and Ultraman) I was a firm believer in the existence of UFOs and aliens (Of course, I blame Steven Spielberg as well, but hey, he was only trying to make ends meet). In the course of time, what started out as a blind acceptance of every other unexplained report in the papers and magazines became a more critical outlook, no doubt inspired and fueled by the early seasons of the X-Files and volumes of Readers Digest special edition books. From little grey/green men in shiny discs, my perception of what is in store for us out there had evolved to the point where I won't be surprised if they turn out to look like Pentel ballpoint pens riding giant marshmallow engines. To this day, the thought that we are somehow alone in the near infinite reaches of space is one that doesn't sit too well with me. Maybe it's my youthful naivete, or just one of those hopeful things we do to make ourselves feel slightly less lonely. After all, the thought that we're the only kind of life (intelligent or otherwise) floating on a blue rock somewhere in a spiral arm of the galaxy, all by ourselves is a bit freaky, innit?

Contact is a novel that addresses these issues not conclusively, but plausibly. Grounded in hard science, physics and astronomy (at least as far as is applicable to our knowledge) Sagan's book, though fictional poses to us a question: what would we do if we were to suddenly receive a message from the stars? Would we panic and cease normal living? Would doomsday cults and messianic promises see a new high (as in Sagan's novel)? What would religion have to say about it? Perhaps more importantly, would we be ready for what we'd find?

It would be exciting, I guess, and scary at the same time. As I read through the book, I tried to remember the last time I actually looked at the stars, and for the life of me I couldn't really remember. When I was a kid, I remember lying down very quietly on the ground outside my grandmother's house looking up, and letting the sky just fill my vision until I dug my fingers into the ground trying not to fall into the sky (to my surprise, the protagonist of the book did the same in her childhood). I remember how quiet it was, and how small I felt. I also remember wanting so much to fly up into that blackness and see what was in store for me. As Sagan mentions, the more we move into the cities, the less we look upwards at the sky as we hurry with our complicated, busy lives. There is simply no more time, we think.

Sure, we look at the moon and tell our other halves what a lovely night it is, or we anticipate an eclipse or meteor shower, and then we hurry on with our lives. The sky must feel lonely, all alone up there. We grow up and we forget the things that once filled our little heads with awe and wonder. There are bills to pay, relationships to fix, mouths to feed. No one has time for awe anymore.

Perhaps there is no one else out there. Perhaps we are truly alone in the universe. Until we know any better, I'd like to think that maybe we do have some neighbours up in the big black sky. They may not look like us or even be any kind of friendly, but it sure makes me sleep better at night, thinking of all those little jeweled worlds with all their stories.

Maybe in some of them they tell stories about us.

Find some perspectives (and a few chuckles) in here. Song taken from Monty Python's Meaning Of Life.