Alien worlds

Many of the actions that we perform as human beings are strongly conditioned by our biological evolution, from our curiosity, which frequently pushes us to investigate beyond our strict survival needs, to our tendency to attempt to predict the future, in an effort to obtain desired outcomes and avoid the undesired ones, but also the more basic bodily functions such as breathing, eating, transpiring, blinking, sneezing, the beating of our hearts, the sleep patterns, and many more, are greatly innate and there is little that we can do to avoid them. 

But there is also a big host of other uses that are purely conventional, that we have embraced as a necessary part of living together as a society. These rites and boundaries are written implicitly in the social contract and in fact vary from among societies, as they are just a reflection of the shared fiction that is society itself: we are a society only because we have decided to be and given ourselves certain rules to live by. To these conventional agreements belong language, bodies of law, politics, money, corporations, government, science, religion, and so forth. They are all imaginary entities that exist only because we have jointly decided (admittedly decades or centuries ago) that they were good ideas and that we could use them to work together. We have also learnt to take them for granted, as if they had always been there and they always will, but I like to think about them occasionally and reflect on their adequacy and usefulness on today's world.

Photo: kalhh on Pixabay

An author that does the same kind of introspection with his art is the cartoonist Nathan W Pyle, whose comics have been recently discovered thanks to one of my Facebook friends. Among his work I really like the "Strange Planet" series, depicting small groups of humanoid aliens interacting among them in fashions that are somewhat similar to the humans, but with a remarkably incisive commentary in line with how aliens might perceive human actions and attitudes. One of the aspects that I like the most is how they do not follow the usual linguistic register, but a quasi-scientific nomenclature for everyday objects and events that I find hilarious. For instance, in a recent cartoon an alien is working on their laptop in the middle of the night and says "Surely some being out there has found the secret to a punctual rest hour" and in the next panel they go on "I must continue to search". Another hilarious cartoon that also plays with the register is XKCD's take on explaining the Saturn V rocket only with the ten hundred most common English words ("thousand" is not one of them), which shows an impressive creativity at spinning this reduced set of words to make a complex explanation.

What would aliens think if they saw us paying for art just to hang it on the wall, or for expensive meals that we are ultimately going to dispose of? How about jogging around the block to come back to your place without having made any intermediate stop, sweating and having lost thirty minutes? What would a telepathic race think of us making noises (and even gestures) to communicate? Why do we dance or build sandcastles? What is the point of singing, or watching the same movie for the third time? None of these activities have anything to do with our immediate survival, but they are essential to making life worth living. So next time you find yourself lamenting that something did not go the way you wanted just take a moment to consider all the things that go right every minute of every day and make life not only possible, but in many cases also pleasurable. Have a nice weekend.