Ed’s Note
The aliens are coming. They are invading in all shapes and sizes, from a charming rock to Spielberg’s disclosures on the morning weather report, matching word for bleeping word all the opaque versions proffered in the US Congress. Never mind the wholesale icing out of the more terrestrial versions across the American hinterland. Not to be outdone, we South Africans have taken to marching against our own semi-local aliens in addition to extorting them.
The alien stuff always flares up as a recurring point of difference whenever the economy tanks a little more. I love this for South Africa — we are democratic about our notions of otherness. But the fear and compulsion to scratch the alien itch are the same whether you are looking at a newly flattened crop circle in some rural outpost, a small papier-mache anthropomorphic mummy in Mexico, or the guy who crossed the border between here and there on a rubber dinghy with hope and prayer. The aliens are always invading.
And they are always more prone to manifesting as enemy aliens when our sense of what we know to be true is eroding like an Egyptian monument announcing the impending invasion of the aliens from Europe, heralding mass destruction.
And to be fair, right now we are living through some pretty peak erosion. We are holding on to our mutually agreed truths by a fraying thread of barely rational assumptions. Uncertain times will do that. The shifting sands of the world order, the baffling technology, the weirdness of the internet, dayglo authoritarian overlords grasping at immortality, and Mercury always, but always, in retrograde. An alien invasion seems just about right for this moment.
To this end I was listening to Neil deGrasse Tyson punt his new book, Take Me to Your Leader: Perspectives on Your First Alien Encounter. If you don’t know him, he is your avuncular uncle in astrophysics. He is the Carl Sagan of the present moment: another scientist remarkably adept at explaining the celestial projections of time and space in simple terms so that dullards like me can follow the fancy maths and mind-bending stuff of the universe. He is also funny.
His point with the aliens is simple — where the hell are they? Show me the body. To make the point, he goes on a little mindventure: imagine you had never seen an octopus and someone (an octopus teacher-adjacent freediver perhaps?) tells you about the creature: it has no bones, it has eight legs and independently firing brains in each limb, it can open doorknobs, escape faster than Houdini from a tank, is born really clever, and has cloaking devices so it can take on the appearance of its environment underwater and makes friends across species. Would you dare to believe it? That is why you have to see it!
The materialist in Neil has all the points about the aliens, and rightly refused to even visit the small dead alien mummies in Mexico, suggesting that he is more qualified to confirm the existence of alien rocks, of which there are many. But his deep dive into the idea of eight-limbed ocean-faring aliens gave me pause.
Imagine how the octopus experiences us? Incredibly slow bipedal creatures with only one piddling brain and no invisibility cloak, who cannot even swim underwater, let alone pick a lock with a limb. Physically totally pathetic, invasive in every possible way, and hell-bent on the total destruction and eradication of the locals that stand in their way. I would be scared of that alien invasion. Very, very scared.
X
Aspasia
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