We are not alone
It’s been a topic of continuous, casual interest for the past couple of years, since the CIA, our most true governing body, has been changing posture towards disclosure regarding the incidence of UFOs and the burning question of intelligences beyond our own.
I was moved to discuss this because I have an unusual perspective about it downstream of the fact that, on the object level, the event itself is not new at all. I will choose to call them aliens throughout this piece for the sake of simplicity, rather than tripping over myself with political correctness to relieve the uneducated of any preconceptions. The thing is this: they’ve been here for a while, possibly even forever as far as our existence stretches back. It’s hard to be sure due to limitations of our relationship with time.
It’s really important to understand that aliens are not any one particular thing. I think even the CIA knows quite well how there are unrelated multitudes, different factions or groups, although the specifics of that I’m sure are not known to the public.
But what is less obvious, perhaps even to the people in-the-know at the CIA, is that the nature of this diffusion of multitudes is radically perceptual. The point I want to underscore is that the dispossession of our preconception of coherence is radically recursive. This is almost a kind of Schrödinger type paradox of knowledge itself, in that ‘aliens’ are simultaneously a known-unknown and an unknown-unknown. What I’m trying to say is, the provenance of our contact is very delicate and unusual. I am sure some at the CIA are aware enough of the specifics to instantiate this general conjecture of mine into the circumstances they actually know.
A good hypothetical example of what I am talking about is this. From what I have been able to tell, the CIA is in contact with probably more than one kind of alien intelligence, and the nature of their concern is probably motivated by some kind of material consequence or reality at hand. While it’s hard to make much conjecture about aliens, it’s not hard to do so with the CIA, who are ultimately human; we know that they share the same nature of concerns as we do, all else equal. Since the CIA is presumed to be comprised of humans who live in the dimension we know of, we can be sure that the nature of their concerns ultimately relate to intelligence and knowledge itself, probably in a simultaneous pursuit of genuine curiosity and also a hedge to maintain and protect the material world we live in as we know it.
The reason this distinction matters is because whatever the animus with aliens, it’s probably not of that nature like ours is. There are likely some sorts of aliens that have greater material knowledge than we do publicly, which may enable them to absorb inertia or bend spacetime in ways that we currently find impossible. Crucially however, there are aliens which exist above us, ergo in dimensions higher than ours. They can see us, but we cannot see them, or more exactly, we can, but not in any way that provides a shareable provenance to our peers. If a sapient fish was able to look up at once despite lacking binocular vision and communicate with a human beyond the sea, there’s no practical way for the human to reveal its existence at once to the rest. Such is our relationship with intelligences like these, and these are probably the explanation of dark matter and dark energy, as we call it.
One thing disclosure has shown us is that humans are enthralled, almost singularly so, with the perception and narration of aliens as a tangible, observable, and ideally shareable phenomenon. This is a supreme irony because the very nature of this Phenomenon is that they all escape such scrutiny. That’s the one thing all aliens have in common, extradimensional or otherwise.
What does first contact look like? It looks like now. It’s you in your room, or on the toilet, or in traffic or at work. It’s Bush and Cheney in the situation room. It’s the Taliban buying ice cream in Kabul. It’s a shipwrecked submarine ogling the RMS Titanic. It looks like nothing at all, but not exactly, because it is there, it does influence and change your world, but both its motivations and its mechanism are not recognisable to you. They’re not recognisable because you are ignorant of some knowledge behind their workings, or because you just cannot appreciate it as a being who is stuck to the three dimensions of space, fixed to time. Or both.
To most, this may be unexciting. I think it makes it even more so.