Vegetarianism, Aliens, and God

            Many movies depict aliens as violent creatures. However, my guess is that any alien that could visit Earth would be so advanced, that we wouldn’t be a threat to them. Do humans feel threatened by mice? By analogy, as the aliens would be to us, we would be to mice.

I became vegetarian in December 2019, partly inspired by Cory Booker, however, I realized that by analogy, just as I didn’t want to eat less advanced Earth creatures, maybe if we didn’t eat simpler Earth creatures, maybe we could hope that any advanced alien that comes to Earth wouldn’t eat us.

            Furthermore, I have written about transparency and opacity. I think that if aliens did visit Earth, they would be powerful enough and advanced enough to remain opaque, although based on the reports of Unexplained Aerial Phenomona from the US military, our sensors are picking up some unexplained things.

            So my guess is that the aliens would be opaque. Would humans give a laptop or a nuclear weapon to a chimpanzee and expect the chimp to use them wisely? Obviously not. Given humanity’s violence, why would any aliens give us technology? So we could be even more efficiently violent towards one another? If we want the aliens to share technology with us, we as a species have to demonstrate that we would use it responsibly, and not just use it as a tool for domination and control.

            We are the most advanced species on Earth, but to imagine that we are the most advanced species in the galaxy, or universe, is incredibly hubristic and anthropocentric.

            God and religion will survive the discovery of extraterrestrial life. God and religion survived the Copernican Revolution and the theory of evolution. God and religion will survive the discovery of aliens. To me, God is light, love, and the unknown. God is light, because light fills the Universe and connects all things. God is love, because that’s what I feel for my human brothers and sisters. God is the unknown, because when we don’t understand something, we say that God did it, or that it was a miracle.

            We shouldn’t be afraid of alien life. Any alien life that can visit Earth is so advanced that it has solved the problem of scarcity. They would have all the things in abundance that humans typically fight over- food, water, energy, land, and so on.

            One of my favorite quotes is from Ralph Waldo Emerson in an essay of his, titled Intellect. It goes something like, “If I were to meet Shakespeare, I would not be conscious of any steep inferiority, no, but of a profound equality.” We should not feel inferior to alien life, but feel a profound equality with them.