Aliens
And why we care so much about them
"So you think there's life out there?" The age-old question that always seems to come up in a hot tub. I've always leaned towards yes (mostly because I once heard Neil deGrasse Tyson all but guarantee it), but regardless of where you stand, I think the more interesting question to unpack is why we care so much about aliens.
UFO's and aliens have been on the brain recently after seeing this story about a seemingly normal family who called the police to report a 10 foot tall being in their yard. Thanks to Space Jam, my first thought was that we're in trouble if these aliens challenge humanity to hoop because even if Wemby can put the pieces together, that’s a tough matchup in the paint. But Monstars and speculative 911 calls aside, there are legitimate sources who came forward at a recent House hearing to testify that the US government is concealing biologics and aircraft of "non-human origin" found at crash sites. The main whistleblower isn't some fringe alien hypebeast, it's a dude who worked for a government task force that was responsible for tracking unidentified aerial phenomena and doing scientific tests on what was found at crash sites. I haven't been this ready to get on board with a conspiracy theory since hearing that Tupac was chilling on a beach in Belize.
Let's have a hot tub thought experiment and pretend like extraterrestrial intelligent life does in fact exist. What does that really change about your outlook on life? Personally, when I'm sitting in a hot tub looking up at the stars, there's a feeling of separation between me and everything else way out there. But, if there's an alien sitting in a hot tub way out there staring up into space and thinking the same thing, that changes everything.
If I really let this scenario sink in, it invokes a profound sense of my life as a tiny part of a crazy complex, powerful, and interconnected thing happening, which is basically the idea of the cosmos: the universe seen as a well-ordered whole. It's not a big leap from there to considering the existence of a higher power, and this is where the hot tub talk really starts to spiral into the deep end.
If you're not ready to dive in and profess that God exists, I'll refer you to the next most holy thing: Morgan Freeman. He narrates the Netflix series Our Universe, and delivers some pretty good points about ~cosmic interconnectedness~. Sure, some of it feels like a stretch, but how come I got goosebumps during the close up of the crab watching a shooting star??
Hot tub talks of this flavor always seem to leave me with an attitude of YOLATMOTYDU (You Only Live At The Mercy Of Things You Don't Understand). YOLO will get you to impulse buy an international flight, but YOLATMOTYDU will get you to worry less about the everyday shit because to prepare and control for everything would be a major overestimation of your power. I realize that advice to "worry less” and “let go” can sound unhelpful and feel a little like giving up, but maybe it's more like giving in to the flow of the universe— the same flow that decides what happens to that other being who is tubbing in a galaxy far far away.
There might be good reason why we don't think much about extraterrestrial life outside of the hot tub. It's a wormhole that always seems to lead to existential questioning of other concepts (free will, egocentricity, linear time, etc.) that we just hold as true in order to move through life without getting lost in the sauce. But if there’s a thesis to Hot Tub Talks, it might be that it's good to dip into the sauce every so often. Wondering at the universe and aliens might lead to unresolved feelings and unanswered questions, but ultimately it leaves me with a broader perspective, a little levity, and a healthy attitude of YOLATMOTYDU.
Send me your favorite conspiracy theories,
Brandon
This made me giggle and tingle with ooos and ahhhhs. Thanks B.