Mass Effect and the universe

I haven’t written a post in a comparatively long while, and I guess I can attribute that to my recent purchase of an Xbox360 game called Mass Effect. I’ve been pretty much been spending all my time on it since then, exploring the virtual galaxy, sleeping with the good aliens and killing the bad ones. I spent about 15 hours over the course of two days working my way through the main storyline, and by the time I got the end I felt that familiar pang of emptiness in knowing that I’ve come the end of a great game.

So I did what I always do when I happen to find myself in that situation – I browse the internet for days on end, meticulously looking up every aspect of the selected mythos, scrutinising the events in the official canon and (in this case) reading up on all the different alien species.

And when I was done doing that, my insatiable appetite for knowledge eventually led my mind to the real world; and thus it humbly wondered about what lay beyond the skies above. Out there. Y’know, the “big black”.

I think that in the incomprehensibly large universe, with its quadrillions of stars and innumerable planets orbiting them is, on the whole, a vast and empty derelict playground. But those quadrillions of stars present quadrillions of opportunities, and all of a sudden thinking that there may be life elsewhere out there seems instead of silly to believe, silly to doubt.

Even sentient life doesn’t seem like that much of a stretch when you think about the endless stream of possibilities on all the planets in all the systems of all the galaxies. What really made me think is that, if there is sentient life out there, do they wonder about us? Do they theorise and postulate and debate in languages or other forms of communication? Do they have societies more technologically advanced than us; less? A better system, or a worse system of government? A freer form of society where people are much more accepted, or a unilateral government that punishes individuality?

Or do they have all of those things on a single planet, boasting variation to rival our own?

I get so caught up in this idea that there may be other sentient life out there and that they may think about us, that I completely forget the barriers that will prevent us from ever meeting them. Or even just knowing who, what and where they are.

I mean, on the off-chance that in that big, black emotionless void of space we call “the universe” some divine spark ignited the flame of life on another planet, we’d never ever know about it. It kinda makes me sad in a way, because it almost feels like a missed opportunity. Two hands aching to touch (they want to meet US, right?), but never quite close enough to reach.

It’s a lament comparable to when I think about the future because both have one thing in common: I won’t be there. Allow me to elaborate a little.

We think we live in a golden age. We live in a society that revolves around technology most of us don’t understand and consider ourselves VERY lucky we weren’t born, say, 150 years ago. I think we’re naive, because if you think about all the unprecedented things the folk in the 1950s couldn’t predict about time period (and if popular trends continue to stay popular), our society will be very different in 50 years time. 100 years time. 500 years time. Unprecedented. It will evolve and change (sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse), empires will rise and fall, people be born, be great and inevitably die.

And eventually humanity will get to the stage where it’ll look back and see us as a “classical civilization”. We’ll be looked at (not necessarily negatively) as primitive and quaint. A broken society that set the foundations for the glorious, united utopia that will arise from the ashes of our soot and pollution fumes like a golden phoenix and dazzle the earth with its incredible ideas, thoughts, feelings, machines and technology. Taint the Earth with sparks of glory.

Don’t you see where I’m going with this? They’ll build a better society on our ruins. On our graves. And I can’t help but feel sad that I’m going to miss out on what the world 500 years from now will offer to those lucky enough to be born into it. Assuming war, famine, disease or general, ominimisanthropy doesn’t lead to our demise, we’ll become something great. We may like to think that we stand on the threshold of the apex of our prime and glory, but in reality our potential puts the house a trillion miles away on another planet.

A planet with life on it. I’ll keep both feet on the ground here and try and stay realistic: the chances of us coming across any form of life in the universe is highly unlikely. Sentient life? Astronomically unlikely (no pun intended). But I like thinking about these things, they really interest me.

And I guess if anyone happens to be reading this right now, you’re probably thinking I’m a crazy person based on my incoherent ramblings, and so I’ll conclude this spurt of randomness.

The universe is a lot like our minds: while most of it is wasted, some parts are truly incredible even as others are dark and scary. It’s endless, it’s infinite and it’s beyond our comprehension. Its mysterious facade only masks the underlying loneliness that echoes across it as it searches for someone else to share in its experiences.

I miss it.