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1936-1939: Life On Other Planets

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From Daily Mail – Have aliens already visited Earth? Nasa book suggests that ancient rock art could have been created by extraterrestrials:

Vakoch begins the 330-page book by postulating how difficult it might be to make first contact.

‘If a radio signal is detected in a modern Seti experiment, we could well know that another intelligence exists, but not know what they are saying,’ he writes in the book’s introduction.

He goes on to add: ‘Even if we detect a civilisation circling one of our nearest stellar neighbours, its signals will have traversed trillions of miles, reaching Earth after travelling for years.’

‘To move beyond the mere detection of such intelligence, and to have any realistic chance of comprehending it, we can gain much from the lessons learned by researchers facing similar challenges on Earth,’ he continues.

‘Like archaeologists who reconstruct temporally distant civilisations from fragmentary evidence, Seti researchers will be expected to reconstruct distant civilisations separated from us by vast expanses of space as well as time.

‘As we attempt to decode and interpret extraterrestrial messages, we will be required to comprehend the mindset of a species that is radically Other.’

Translation: YOU WANNA LIVE IN THE GALAXY? GROW UP! A civilization that Others, belongs in the Zoo.

So when we’re talking about genuinely progressing our culture – extended personhood, #thereisnonormal, gender fluidity, trans rights, empathy for all living things, posthumanism, etc – we’re preparing ourselves to enter a galactic culture. Worst case, we grow up.

Just like climate change action – worst case we clean up the planet and build a better world.

Right.

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Here in Britain, our weakling government is attempting to launch a web filter that would somehow erase “violent material” from Internet provision — placing it, by association, in the same category as child pornography. Every week seems to bring a new attempt to ban something or other because it’s uncomfortably or scary or perhaps even indefensibly disgusting. Meanwhile, Jim Carrey is refusing to promote his latest film, Kick-Ass 2, following a change of heart in which he “cannot support that level of violence.”

That, right there, is the problem, as I see it.

Imagine if Mr. Carrey had instead decided to do the press tour for Kick-Ass 2. Imagine if, on every stop on the junket, he’d used this promotional soapbox to talk about real-world violence versus violent fiction. His reticence to appear in support of the film comes from the Newtown shooting event — an event, like all the others, characterized by those left behind saying, “I don’t understand.”

The fact that he didn’t use the opportunity is less a failure of intelligence and imagination than it is a symptom of the way we generally demonize violent acts and violent work. We make them Other, and we just distance ourselves. They are Other, and they didn’t come from us, and we’re just going to stand over there and shake our heads sadly. And, moreover, anyone who gets closer to it in order to experience or understand it must be a freak.

…

The function of fiction is being lost in the conversation on violence. My book editor, Sean McDonald, thinks of it as “radical empathy.” Fiction, like any other form of art, is there to consider aspects of the real world in the ways that simple objective views can’t — from the inside. We cannot Other characters when we are seeing the world from the inside of their skulls. This is the great success of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter, both in print and as so richly embodied by Mads Mikkelsen in the Hannibal television series: For every three scary, strange things we discover about him, there is one thing that we can relate to. The Other is revealed as a damaged or alienated human, and we learn something about the roots of violence and the traps of horror.

http://www.vulture.com/m/2013/08/warren-ellis-essay-why-we-need-violent-stories.html

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