ALIENS

Do aliens exist? Do you care????

Surveying the intergalactic landscape, astrophysicist Adam Frank’s The Little Book of Aliens (191 pp., Harper Collins) collates the panics around UFO phenomena, the establishment of SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), and the tremendous scientific developments in the 20th century that shaped public discourse, such as the discovery of exoplanets and technosignatures—biosignatures or signs of advanced life on other planets.

Interestingly, the government and popular culture overwhelm the quest to determine whether humans are alone, with all the longing and desire collapsing under the weight of perceived threats or creative potential. It’s like a search party with misaligned motivations, with participants hoping the search will produce entertainment, not just knowledge. The government piggybacks on search efforts to determine whether what’s out there is a threat. Frank’s playful, earnest narration—occasionally interspersed with urgency meant to keep the reader on edge—exists somewhere between knowledge and entertainment, allowing uninitiated readers to draw open-ended conclusions with him.

The Drake Equation, which uses Frank Drake's complex mathematics to determine the likelihood of extraterrestrial species existing via planetary signal transmission, and Fermi's Paradox, which contrasts the possibility of alien life with the inherent inconsistency of the evidence, are key factors in contextualizing the information Frank lays out. The Kardashev Scale similarly provides intellectual scaffolding, using energy consumption to measure a civilization’s level of advancement.

The pop cultural imagining of aliens overcrowds the collective imagination. Nobody knows what a Dyson Sphere is, but everybody has an idea of what an alien looks like based on a history rife with audiovisual depictions of something we’re unsure even exists. Frank tries to restore equilibrium, attempting to offset the unseriousness. “On the other hand, all those terrible B-movie aliens made the whole subject seem like a joke,” says Frank. “This was the birth of what’s been called the ‘giggle-factor,’ where any mention of SETI, technosignatures, or even astrobiology gets accompanied by raised eyebrows and snickers.”

The glut of available information, profuse yet insufficient, provides no grand unified exegesis, only the aggregate glow of suggestion, fuzzily illuminating the search for answers to the question, "Do aliens exist?” Frank eschews the categorical statement that aliens exist—that’s not what scientists do. But the book is intended to nudge you in the direction of belief by heavily implying it. Therein lies a curious similitude between scientists and believers. Critical inquiries into the possibility of aliens remain ontologically unstable hypotheses, but scientists like Frank possess an almost ecclesiastical enthusiasm. For people who stake their professional identity in defending their ideas against refutation, you would think they would conform to the impenetrable skepticism presumed of them more convincingly, especially about something too untenable to justify disbelief or faith in. Instead, they’ve found a convenient escape clause, existing in a conceptual ambiguity hewn out of the unproven-but-not-disproven contents of the junk jar that is astrobiology. The result is thinly veiled postulation disguised as equivocation—the scientific method goes out the window for sly, alien-optimist arguments for the existence of life in the cosmos.

This no man’s land renders scientists merely the grounded narrators of their sort of science fiction. The tellability is questionable, too, as the search for knowledge and meaning, while generative, is ultimately irresolute, leading the reader back to where they began. But when you think you’re getting somewhere, you reach an anti-climactic dead end: the epistemic limits of science—the inherent incompleteness of science.

And yet, this genre composed of false starts has produced a surplus of books. Since it’s all the same information—rehashed and reorganized—the reader has to evaluate how compellingly they’ve niched it down, although it doesn’t always narrow the focus for brevity like in the over 400 pages of UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life Here and Out There (438 pp., Simon and Schuster) by Garrett M. Graff. Graff, a former POLITICO editor who has covered politics, technology, and national security since the early 2000s, takes us down the alien rabbit hole, contextualizing the US government’s dogged pursuit of interdimensional national security threats, which overlaps with Frank’s work.

Like Frank, Graff covers saucer sightings, the space race, H.G. Wells’ "War of the Worlds," Drake’s Equation, and Fermi’s Paradox, highlighting the interplay between scientific advancement and public curiosity with war. In the chapter "Saucer-Mania," he states, “All made waves in the midst of—and aligned with—a broader cultural preoccupation with armageddon.” Graff painstakingly catalogs the search for alien life from the government’s vantage point, a search that offers little insight for the reader. At least Frank tries to say there’s a point to all of it—that “aliens matter” on an existential level. On the other hand, Graff is merely an enlisted recruit of the government’s search party; his POV is as illegible as it is redundant.

There is utility in Graff’s synthesis, but you need a special interest in aliens or government gossip to appreciate it. Jaime Green’s The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination, and Our Quest for Kinship in the Cosmos is still the best that the genre has to offer, truncating the same overlapping history in a way I found more emotionally resonant, which I appreciate, but I still do not care that much.

Aliens: 2/10.

This is the first installment of "boys," a column dedicated to investigating "the domain of the masculine" (categorically boy things). Pitch me: princessbabygirl444ever@gmail.com.