The following day, as a tribute to the victims of the Great Earthquake, astronauts on the International Space Station tweeted photos of Nepal as seen from the station that day. For someone like me who is uninitiated in satellite imagery, it was impossible to find Nepal in the milky jumble of the clouds. But whenever I see any such images of the earth captured from the outside, I always wonder: If there are aliens out there, they might also be looking down on us, taking similar pictures.I have always been fascinated by the prospect of life outside earth, my appetite for the 'little green men' out there first whetted by the action-filled Aliens comics. So when I heard yesterday that I could play an active part in the hunt for extraterrestrial life through a new Android app, I quickly downloaded it. It's part of a new US $100 million alien-search project started by Stephen Hawking with the help of Yuri Milner, a Russian venture capitalist. Through the BOINC app, I will help in the analysis of the signals collected by two giant telescopes searching for signs of extraterrestrial life.
It's a useful distraction. Each of us is otherwise inundated with the same run-of-the-mill problems: our list of gripes ranging from dead-end jobs to our rather sedentary lifestyle to our confinement to this 'god-forsaken' land when our best friends are travelling the world, making money, and actually living. You curse the day you decided to stay back to do 'something' for the country, even as, every single year without fail, you were also faithfully filling up the DV forms on the side, just in case.
What luxury in this pell-mell to be able to recline on your deckchair under the blanket of the twinkling stars at night, and think about the unearthly beings. Of course, when you first learn to think on your own, everyone else besides you is an alien. Just like the little boy in Cormac McCarthy's The Road, you come to see the world as a stage and other folks as actors whose sole purpose, in acting out their prescribed roles, is to keep you entertained. This kind of entertainment has at different times been provided by different people.
Perhaps the first (and among the most famous) works on extraterrestrial life is H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds (1897). It's a first-person narrative of an over-thinking philosopher, the protagonist, about the invasion of earth by wily Martians. Having read it all those years ago, there isn't much that I can remember about the book except for scenes of some capsule-like vehicles landing on earth. When they opened, they disgorged big, scary Martians.
Wells, born into a middle-class English family, was acutely aware of the struggles of his family to make their ends meet from their small shop selling sports goods. His father, Joseph, played county cricket for Kent, but there was no money in the amateur sport. Thus initiated into poverty in early childhood, Wells, in his later life, came to be greatly influenced by T.H. Huxley, the famous Darwinist who was also his biology teacher at Imperial College, London.
In the reckoning of many critics, The War of the Worlds was no more than a reflection of the writer's earthly concerns. The successful invasion of earth by Martians, as such, was the perfect illustration of the Darwinian principle of the survival of the fittest. The Martians could conquer earth so easily because their civilization, following a longer evolutionary process, was more sophisticated than the nascent human civilization. The book is a commentary on the inequities in Britain brought about by the Industrial Revolution, the disproportionate benefit of which went to the well-off, the equivalents of the mighty Martians on earth.
Or so I was told by my high-school English teacher, another ardent HG Wells fan. In her view there were few other writers who managed to so skillfully capture the mundane realities of everyday life through such improbable allegories. Which was also the reason, I suspect, I was so into it in the first place.
Like my English teacher, I too believe that someday we will discover life outside earth. Humans, after all, have so far explored only a sliver of this vast, limitless cosmos. And I am not the only one who thinks so. In a Space.com poll with over 100,000 respondents, 90 percent of the responders say they believe there is life outside this planet.
Yet I am not expecting a ping on my phone from the outer space anytime soon. But then nor was I expecting anything out of the ordinary on that chilly April afternoon.
biswas.baral@gmail.com
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