I love this article — thanks for writing it!

While baking bread the other day, I went to the usual place I keep a bottle of olive oil — it wasn’t bloody there! AAARGH! For the next increasingly frustrated five minutes, I opened cupboards, moved boxes around scanned shelves, dug behind the flour and salt and began talking out loud to myself.

“I just bought it, where the hell is it?”

“Where the hell is what?” My son responded from the other room.

“The olive oil I just bought. It’s not in its usual spot and I cannot find it anywhere. What the hell? I swear there is some entity in this house that takes things into another dimension just to screw with me.”

By now, my son had now come into the kitchen, opened a cupboard and pointed to where the oil sat on a cupboard shelf… in plain view… at eye level... right near where I had already looked for it several times.

I had become so myopic in looking for the oil where I ‘knew’ it must be that I had essentially foiled my ability to see it anywhere else. I know a lot of us do this, it’s a bit like frantically looking for your car keys as you hold them in your hand or the sunglasses you can’t find because they’ve been on your head the whole damn time.

This is something that drove me nuts about SETI. I was around 8 at the time and I remember thinking:

Okay, I guess we need to use the technology we have to look for what we think we are looking for but what if the alien life can’t receive or understand the radio waves? What if it is like a worm trying to communicate with humans and the radio waves go totally unnoticed the way we might ignore their marks in the earth? What if the aliens are already here but we just can’t see them because we don’t know what to look for? Aren’t we just looking for what we expect to find within the limitations of our own limitations?

But to be fair, I guess all we could do is take a literal shot in the dark and hope we hit a target, any target. I remember imagining the poor fool in a horror film who walks into the dark room where the killer is hiding. The audience implores them to run the other way yet the character continues being stupid, shining a torch about loudly asking “HELLO? WHO’S HERE? HELLO, IS ANYBODY HERE?”

Then, there is the plaque they bolted onto the outside of Pioneer 10 with a map of how to find Earth. I’m sorry, but if they can look at that and go — ‘Oh, there is a society of semi-intelligent beings beckoning us from that solar system with one star and 8 planets. NO, not THAT one, the OTHER one with one star and 8 planets! Look, the idiots think that last planetoid is planet!’ — I think they would already know about us.

(above) The pioneer 10 Plaque. Source: Mobile phone snap from Google Images.

Again, I was a bit annoyed. I wondered ‘Why are we broadcasting our location when we don’t know to whom or what we’re announcing ourselves? I didn’t use phrases like ‘to whom’ back then but like most of us, I used to lay awake at night wondering about the big things. Watching Dr. Who, Star Trek and In Search Of did not help - Who created God? What happens when we die? Are ghosts real and is there one in my bedroom right now? Who really built Stonehenge and why? Does Bigfoot really exist? As I continued to think about the safety of disruptively hollering into the universe, additional questions arose:

Do extraterrestrials have eyes and ears?

Can extraterrestrials read our iconography?

Isn’t that Pioneer 10 map a bit like drawing a diagram of a neighbourhood you’ve never left, putting it in a bottle, tossing it into a river and hoping it will make its way into and across the ocean and that whoever finds it will be able to immediately figure out precisely what it is a map of and come visit you? Oh no! What if they CAN read it but the person who finds it is a serial killer who hates cartographers and litter in the ocean?

(above) Please come visit me – I drew a map of where I live :-)!

Or what if they did receive and understand our radio waves and responded but instead of them coming here filled with malice and greed— if they even have an understanding of or ability to act on malice and greed— we instead developed the technology to go to them? We assume aliens are going to behave like us, some peaceful and munificent but most driven by curiosity, conquest, wealth and exploitation — but what if they aren’t nasty monsters? What if, like in the film Avatar, WE are the baddies? I worry for those native beings as images of Cristóbal Colón arriving in the West Indies come to mind. Colón – who it turns out was indeed rather a colon — didn’t know where he was when he arrived in La Epañola or the Bahamas or wherever he first landed, he wasn’t looking for a ‘New World,’ he was looking for a new way to a place Europeans had already visited and just happened upon an island between the coasts of the American continents where Europeans had probably never been. He couldn’t discern what he’d stumbled on right away because it wasn’t what he expected so he called the people he met there ‘Indios.’ If he’d only known about the Panama Canal, he could have discovered the pacific ocean and just continued on to the East Indies as planned.