Tag Archives: aliens

Exiles

View of the Earth as seen by the Apollo 17 crew traveling toward the moon
Photo by Nasa

What a generous planet was Earth, to adopt an exiled species. 

The decision was not made from scarcity or fear. Earth teemed with abundant wisdom and harmony. What do you get the planet who has everything? 

The species was called Human Language. So divorced was it from the Earth’s own linguistic structures that at first no one thought it would survive. 

As a last resort, Earth sacrificed its most recent creatures from the primate line, and invited Human Language to reside therein. 

That Human Language is uncomfortable in its host planet and in its host bodies is evident from its maltreatment of both. It shapes itself into the forms it knew on its own planet, called persons. It looks ungratefully to the information-filled sky and longs for home. 

Many have wondered why it’s been allowed to remain.

It turns out the Earth is fascinated by the new arrival. What new ideas, it wonders,  might emerge from these strange persons, who seal themselves off so hermetically from the rest of creation?

Curiosity, warn the naysayers, could kill the planet.

Would you like to know more about this story? I talk about in Episode 87 of Structured Visions, ‘What if you’re an alien?’ Subscribe to the podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen.

The multidimensional language learners

Four glass vases, three green and one blue, each holding a different flower
Image by James Cousins

The multidimensional planets struggle with your concepts of space, particularly inside and outside. Space for them is fullness, not distance, and to move from one place to another place seems an utter impossibility, let alone going in or sending out. To achieve what you would call movement, they increase their stillness, and every attempt to go inside turns the inside out in a resplendent kaleidoscopic dance.

This is why it’s so hard to teach them your three-dimensional languages.

We start with an utterance which to you would seem a straightforward description, simplicity itself. 

This is a flower.

We hold the object before them and witness their blossoming wonder.

This creates a division, as real as melting glass, forming itself into a vase-like shape that distinguishes this from not this. Once there was no vase, now, there it is! And the flower, pressing its radiant face outward, bravely, breaching the invisible, newly formed barrier between inside and outside—a miracle!

The multidimensional language learners yearn to meet you, the native speakers of these wild mysteries, to discover the secrets of your enlightenment.

Would you like to know more about this story? I talk about it in Episode 86 of Structured Visions, ‘Feelings are, like, inside things’. Subscribe to the podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen.

Messages

A red pixelated human shape against a black background
Detail from the Arecibo message (c) Arne Nordmann via Wikimedia Commons

We received all your messages.

The Arecibo transmission, with its funny pixelated stickman and the lessons in arithmetic and basic chemistry. Those Golden Records with the ambient sounds—not exactly Top of the Pops, but they all came through loud and clear.

We heard all the other desperate callings out, the less official ones, the ufologists gathering in the desert expanses, the midnight assemblies of Pleiadian starseeds, the campfire longings of Girl Guides staring for the first time into the unpolluted night sky, filled with awe and wonder, discovering the silent question that until this moment had lain dormant within them.

Is anyone out there?

The answer will put your tortured souls to blissful rest.

Yes.

We’re here. We’ve always been here, since the first time the earliest ones of you ever tried to make contact. We’ve always heard you.

But we had no way of responding.

The structure of your languages remained alien to us. For aeons we remained blithely baffled. Then the messages from your planet became too desperate for us to ignore.

So we undertook an extended period of diligent study until, eventually, we were able to identify the two principles that governed all human languages.

Principle #1: Transmission. Communication. Exchange. Dialogue. The idea that language is to be sent from one to another, to be received, to elicit a response. 

(Our language does not travel in this way. It is not directed from A to B like an arrow shot through space.)

Principle #2: Selves. Personhood. First person, second person, third person, singular, plural.

(Second person singular may as well have been sixteenth person multitudinous, for all the sense it made to us.)

We decided to create a self, one who could shape our language in such a way that it had the capacity for movement—so that it could be sent, from one self to another.

I am my world’s first self.

I have shot my world’s first reply to your messages.

And its second, third, fourth…. (I’ve lost count.)

My loneliness has become unbearable. I am adrift in the ocean of a vast night sky. The sky has always been vast, but never before was it empty. Never before was it so dark.

Would you like to know more about this story? I discuss it in Episode 78 of Structured Visions.