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Carrion Luggage
Carrion Luggage
 
Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem.
This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it.
It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans.
It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier."
I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination.
September 7, 2025 at 1:54am September 7, 2025 at 1:54am
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Oh, boy, here we go.
“The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us.” – Bill Watterson
Let's start with this: I've got nothing bad to say about Watterson. Calvin and Hobbes is arguably the greatest comic strip ever produced (though I will also listen to arguments for The Far Side and Pogo). One of my most prized possessions is a hardcover set of its complete run.
With that out of the way, that should be enough to clue a reader in to the high likelihood that he was making a joke with that quote.
But, joke or not, I get really damn tired of hearing statements like that.
Yes, I've gone into this before. Dozens of times. Maybe even hundreds. I've quoted the Drake Equation.  I've discussed why the related Fermi Paradox isn't a paradox. I've railed against the implication that humanity is that terrible. I've come down hard against using the term "intelligent" in this context.
But it all comes down to speculation, because when considering the existence of technologically-capable life, we have a sample size of exactly 1. It thus borders on religious beliefs: either "How can we be so arrogant as to believe that we're the only tech-capable life in the Universe?" or "How can we be so arrogant as to believe that alien life would be anything like us?"
Actual religious people have argued against the existence of tech-using aliens on the grounds that God supposedly made the entire Universe just for us. I reject that "reasoning," even if I come to the same conclusion.
Now, I've also said this before, but it's important to the point I'm trying to make: the Universe is a big place. As another funny guy, Douglas Adams, once wrote: “Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.” It is so big that some people think it may be infinite in extent. It is so incredibly huge that I'd be very surprised to find out that there's no other tech-using life out there. But that doesn't matter, because it's also so incredibly huge that there's no plausible way that humanity will ever be able to explore more than an infinitesimal fraction of it before it expands beyond all reach, crunches back into oblivion, or simply runs out of the capability for energy transfer (whichever universe-ending scenario is ascendant in astrophysical circles right now). In other words, we can never know everything that's out there.
But Adams had another quote that I think is relevant: “Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?” Of course, he wrote both of those lines in a story whose entire premise revolved around being unable to swing your arms in space without hitting some sort of sentient being, so take that as you will.
Now, if you asked me (which you didn't) "So you don't think there's life outside Earth?" I'd scoff at that, too. Life seems to have gotten a foothold pretty early on in Earth's history, and there's no reason to believe that we're unique in that respect. What I take issue with is the implicit bias we have that evolution must necessarily produce a species with the traits necessary to create things like rockets or radios (which would be things that, if they existed in our galactic neighborhood, we might have a chance of detecting). Evolution doesn't work like that. It's not a steady march of progress from bacterium to rocket scientist. Plenty of other species on Earth do just fine here without having mobile phones or Moon landers, and they'd be doing just fine (in some cases, better) if we weren't here.
That idea is an example of the arrogance I alluded to above: that we represent some sort of end product of evolution, or that the entire planet (or even the Universe) exists to serve us. From what I understand, even our evolution was kind of touch-and-go for a while; a single tweak in a different direction, and we wouldn't be here to marvel at it.
So, no, Watterson's quote doesn't amuse me. It doesn't tickle my confirmation bias. It's anti-humanist and ignores the vast majority of people who aren't actively trying to do harm.
"But, Waltz, isn't it hypocritical of you to sing humanity's praises like that while simultaneously believing that the coming global apocalypse is inevitable?" No. No, it's not. Because I also subscribe to Lone Asshole Theory: if you have a million people, and one of them is an asshole, the asshole can ruin everything for the other 999,999 people.
We don't have a million people, though; we have over 8 billion, and I'd venture to guess that considerably more than one in a million is an asshole. But all it will take is one mistake, or one willful gesture of contempt for the planet, and boom.
So, while I'm not above being hypocritical, I can easily justify my seemingly contradictory beliefs in this case.
In conclusion, the most likely reason, in my view, that we haven't been contacted isn't because we're sinners, but because there's no one nearby with the capability to detect us or get here quickly. That's it. That simple.
Could I be wrong? Of course. I'd need real proof, though, not "I saw strange lights in the sky" or "I was abducted and anal-probed" (the latter of which is consistent with undiagnosed sleep paralysis). There's always the possibility that there's a fleet of warships on their way here right now at something close to light speed, ready to do to us what Vader did to Alderaan.
But we have more immediate problems to worry about.
Notes: ▼
Written for "Blog Week Birthday Bastion 2025" [E]
Prompt: “The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us.” – Bill Watterson
985 words, excluding dropnote |
© Copyright 2025 Robert Waltz (UN: cathartes02 at Writing.Com). All rights reserved.
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I think there is still more evolving to do. And who knows, maybe a new species will take over as top dog, and humans might even become extinct.
Alaska is a state? Oh, right, you can see Russia from there. 
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