'I Want to Believe'
On the existence of aliens.
“Is mankind alone in the universe? Or are there somewhere other intelligent beings looking up into their night sky from very different worlds and asking the same kind of question?”
Carl Sagan and Frank Drake, “The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence,” Scientific American (January 1997)
I’ve been thinking a lot about aliens lately.
In January, I started watching For All Mankind on Apple+ with Haley. Around the same time, I cracked open Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary, which had been at the top of my unread books pile for months. Both the show and the novel deal with human beings flying into outer space to inhabit other planets or discover (inadvertently, in the case of PHM) that humanity is not alone in the universe.
Though we don’t see each other as much anymore, I have one friend who comes to mind whenever I think of aliens. I cannot share his name publicly—he may lose his job if it gets out that he’s a believer—so I’ll refer to him only as Professor Space Rox1, his former AOL screen name. An expert on Martian geology, The Professor teaches planetary science at the university, where he concludes each semester with a lecture on the possibility on intelligent life beyond our known world.
While working my way through the four seasons of FAM, I texted him with two questions: “Would you go to Mars?” (His doctoral research was on the flow of that planet’s ancient rivers, and he once nearly came to blows with a Swedish rival who claimed they flowed in the opposite direction). And more importantly, “Do aliens exist?”
His response to the first was, “Not for a million bucks.”2 To the second, “Meet me in the shed behind my house tomorrow at 9:01 p.m. Bring salsa…mango flavor.”
The shed was covered in an old, black tarp. The wood was warped and crumbling from the outside. On the inside, however, the space was pristine, the pearl-white walls covered from floor to ceiling with elaborate charts and print-out images like a scene from A Beautiful Mind. “Welcome to my lair,” he said, rekindling the memory of when the Apocalyptic Cowboy invited me into his own secret compound (though The Professor’s only had one weapon: his mind).
We emptied two bags of lime-flavored Tostitos as I prodded him about his research, both the scientific kind and that which involves watching a lot of YouTube videos. Over the subsequent hours, he explained to me the Fermi paradox—the discrepancy between the lack of substantive evidence for alien existence and the high probability that something (or someone) is out there watching us. Seeing as we first met in a Bible study of other intellectually curious, socially awkward adult men, we also discussed religion and whether, as Bible-believing Christians, it is even kosher to consider intelligent life forms existing beyond the boundaries of our planet. The Professor, who may or may not have once shared Vienna sausages with Big Foot after the Burning Man festival in 2013, pulled back a stack of charts to reveal hand-drawn pictures of creatures that have already been documented by the authors of the Hebrew scriptures. They included sea monsters and dragons, talking donkeys, even mutant angels with eagle’s wings and a lion’s body—or in the case of the Ophanim, a big-ass eye encircled by four rotating wheels of a bajillion smaller eyes.
Why wouldn’t there be aliens?
“God can do whatever He wants,” he texted me a few days later, along with several clips of South Park episodes involving aliens. “If he wants there to be creatures with superior technology or powers, that doesn’t alter the hierarchy of reality of his love for us.”
He also reminded me of what the cartoonist Bill Watterson (creator of Calvin & Hobbes) wrote in one of his comic strips: “Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.”
Human beings can be pretty crummy. If I were an egg-headed green dude floating above Earth’s atmosphere and saw us blowing up babies with remote-controlled bombs and pumping chemicals into the drinking water, I might turn the ship around, too.
While the conversation in his shed was a good one, I walked out as unsure as when I’d stumbled in with the salsa. I’m not sure that I need to know if aliens are really hovering outside our atmosphere, waiting to make contact. What I’m more curious about is the way we deal with the possibility of life forms we haven’t yet encountered. If they were to exist, would we seek to understand them? Or blow them out of the sky? What would meeting an extraterrestrial reveal about our humanity?3
When European explorers met the Indigenous people of the Americas—the equivalent, I’d say, of meeting space dudes in flying saucers today—they killed most of them. We’ve been killing, stealing from, lying, and doing bad things to each other for a long time. You could say human beings have a historical tendency to lead with our worst qualities.
I finished Project Hail Mary on Monday morning while the guys at Fisher Tire changed the oil in Haley’s car. It’s excellent, and it won’t spoil the book to tell you that most of the second and third acts revolve around the relationship between an American scientist and an alien spider also trying to save his planet. The movie version, starring Ryan Gosling as the male protagonist, will be released in 2026.
The story is heavy on the scientific aspects of space exploration and the logistics of how we’d interact with creatures that evolved in a different corner of our universe. But, at its core, I think it’s much more about us. What we long for. What we’re capable of. What we love.
I’m not particularly into alien movies. As a 7-year-old, I crapped my pants watching Mars Attacks! I thought Independence Day and Signs were okay (who else had nightmares of the Brazil scene for a decade?). Of the more recent entries in the genre, I enjoyed Jordan Peele’s Nope. But, if you’ve seen it, you already know it’s less about aliens and more about coping with our own genealogies and traumas, and what we seek to get from our years on Earth, whether or not we’re probed.
Space is a place where our curiosity will never find its conclusion.
And I think that’s why it’s nice to have friends like Professor Space Rox or the Apocalyptic Cowboy, who in his office at the undisclosed location in South Knoxville where he is employed has the famous X-Files poster that reads “I Want To Believe,” with a picture of a UFO, hanging on the wall.
I want to believe, too. In a lot of things.
Read previous The Weekly Big Head columns.
Upgrade your subscription for as little as $4.17/month to join The Attic Club, where I share a super-secret dispatch every week, plus early drafts of other projects.
While his expertise is on the rock formations of other planets, I once saw The Professor suffer a convulsive attack outside the coffee shop of a mutual friend on Sutherland Ave. On Opening Day, we were inside working when he caught sight of something through the big glass windows at the front. “Hold on a second…” he said before stomping out the front door. He then proceeded to gesticulate wildly for 30 seconds. So much so, that two other friends and the owner rushed out to see what was wrong. “Who did you consult for this? Was it Sören?” he said, pointing angrily at the decorative rock structures at the entrance of the building. “Umm, no,” the owner said. “I just thought it looked nice.” The Professor then collapsed to the floor.
Why would someone who’s dedicated their career to Mars not be interested in interstellar travel? Two reasons. The first, verbatim, is because “it’s a cold, dusty hellhole bombarded by cosmic radiation.” The second is because they’ve taken enough of his life already. When asked to clarify whether “they” are the dried-up rivers, the U.S. government, or alien lifeforms, he said, “You know exactly who,” then put his phone on Do Not Disturb.
The Professor had a clip for this, from South Park’s April 2009 episode “Pinewood Derby” episode about space cash.
Random fact: Project Hail Mary is possibly my favorite book of all time.