Lately we have been hearing more and more about Unidentified Flying Objects. Are there extraterrestrial civilizations dropping in on us? Well, there must be, right? I mean, just look at all the stars and you’ll see so many just in our universe alone. Now, think about all the other universes and ask yourself just how arrogant we must be to think we are all alone out here.
Come on, we’ve all heard the reports from spectators and pilots alike about what they see. But inevitably, it comes down to one great conspiracy theory: the government knows they are there, but is keeping all that knowledge from us. That would mean that all the governments throughout history, no matter how contentious they are with each other, would have to have gotten together and kept the secret from all of us. Not possible.
Then there’s the question of what the people on these space vehicles are likely to do. Would they land here and try to subdue us, like the British, the Spanish, and the Dutch did when they came across the waters? Or, maybe it’s possible they’ve seen all of this before on different worlds and all they are doing is keeping us under surveillance. I’m assuming all of these beings must live a long time. After all, we keep doubling our lifespans. We used to live to 40. Now we’re doubling that. So how old are the people in the spaceships? Are they 200, 400, 600? We have an overpopulation problem in this world and maybe they do where they come from, too.
What would we do if one day we looked up and saw hundreds of thousands of spacecrafts invading us? Would we use the millions and millions and millions of guns we have to shoot them? Are you kidding? To their advanced civilization, our weapons would seem like pea shooters.
Maybe they have figured out how to move beyond war and conquest. Maybe the people in these spaceships come from civilizations that know how to co-exist with one another. But let’s not forget that when the fictitious Krypton exploded and Superman was sent to the United States, the civilization he came from looked an awful lot like ours. There were crooks and cops and robbers.
It’s all pretty exciting, depending on the intentions of those who are flying by. Maybe they’ll decide that some people are just too greedy and warlike, so they ought to be put away. Wouldn’t that be something?
Speaking of neighbors:
Most of the time, when a long-standing neighbor moves, one is left with quite a hole in their existence. When I grew up on 96th Street in Manhattan, we lived in a 13-floor (really 14, but you never had an unlucky 13th floor) building with four apartments on every floor. We were in the “B” apartment on the second floor and an elderly lady lived in the “C” apartment. Anyway, we knew Mrs. Stein, who worked at a bakery and had our door key. In all the years we lived there, we never knew the names of the people in the other apartments. That’s because there is a kind of anonymity in a big city that you might not find in a place like Great Barrington, Massachusetts (population 7,000.) Here, when one of our neighbors moves away, especially the usual nice kind, it is a loss.
Oh, you may have had a tiff or two, but ultimately you know that if you ever needed them, they’d be there. That has been borne out again and again. I guess it is inevitable that people will move on, but when our neighbors Ron and Kate moved out of the big city (Great Barrington) to the country (Egremont), we were saddened. Good luck in the country, dear neighbors.
