Are we alone? There are so many possible ways to begin to answer this question. The backstory on the Fermi Paradox – why we haven’t encountered aliens yet – reads like science fiction. Certainly, the scenarios it sets out are all consigned to the realm of storytelling for now, and even the most logical theories may turn out to be wildly inaccurate. For this reason, the science and fiction of alien contact have much in common, with speculation on the subject sometimes more useful than empirical approaches.

The idea of an intertwining between science and fiction on this subject has historical underpinnings. Early scientific papers in the west by the likes of Francis Bacon and Johannes Kepler took the form of “contes philosophiques” or “philosophical tales”, in which the fictional framework of an imaginary or dream journey surrounded some sort of scientific speculation. In the late 1800s, some scientists even presented their findings in the form of poetry.

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The boundary between fact and fiction is particularly porous when we’re talking about extraterrestrial life. When we finally do encounter intelligent alien life, it’s likely that most or all of our fictional and scientific speculation will be rendered obsolete – that everything you’ve read on the subject will be like the supposed canals on Mars in fiction from days of yore, or the jetpack future we were promised in the 1950s.

If we’re not diligent and on guard, our conceptualisations default to the wrong things

Any methodology applied to the subject of aliens must factor in the limitations of the human gaze. Part of the problem is the obvious one: we have only five senses (so far) and no matter how we augment those senses with hard tech, it is still difficult for our imaginations to extrapolate beyond those senses. We see this daily in how we continue to behave in self-destructive ways, stand behind terrible policies, because some of the consequences are hidden from our direct view or occur in a realm invisible to us. Nor is this lack a problem for the layperson only. Dedicated scientists experience it as well.

Our brains also constantly work to convert the world into metaphors and similes – into comparisons that help us to navigate our way through life. Some of this is instinctual, some specific to culture, as explored in Hofstadter and Sander’s fascinating book Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking. In trying to reach beyond, our limitation is that if we’re not diligent and on guard, our conceptualisations default to the wrong things.

A recent example of this limitation comes directly from SETI – in a New York Times op-ed piece by Seth Shostak, director for the Center for SETI Research at the SETI Institute. In talking about the risk of proactively sending out signals that might be picked up by a hostile presence, he speculates about how aliens might perceive the injustices we’ve perpetrated on one another:

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jeff VanderMeer … ‘The boundary between fact and fiction is particularly porous when we’re talking about extraterrestrial life.’ Photograph: Murdo Macleod

“Personally, I think this concern is overwrought,” he writes. “Any society that can pick up our radio messages will be at a level of development at least centuries beyond our own. They would be no more incensed by our bad behaviour than historians who learned that Babylonians attacked one another with spears.”

Perhaps Shostak is trying to be relatable for a general audience, but if the director of SETI can conceptualise aliens in such an unimaginative way, it exposes a possible flaw at the heart of our endeavours. The same day I read the SETI editorial, I also read an article about a professor from the University of Barcelona who thought about aliens in the context of Bayesian Statistics. His conclusion? That Aliens Will Be Bear-Size, According to Math, and, specifically, we will encounter at some point a planet of about 50m intelligent bear-sized aliens.

If I self-identify as an absurdist in thinking about this weird world of ours, it is to remind myself that life often only forms a coherent narrative because we impose that narrative upon it. If I want to always be aware of the irrational behaviour of human beings and of human institutions, it is to avoid writing from the same old defaults.



A constraint was put on the question “Are we alone?” by SETI, in its decision to monitor radio waves, and to focus mostly on a certain range of radio waves. A default assumption was made because it had to be made, because sometimes science is just a best guess. But are alien super-civilisations really “absent from 100,000 nearby galaxies” as reported in a Scientific American article, or are we just too primitive or bound by our own perspective to see them?



Are alien super-civilisations really 'absent from 100,000 nearby galaxies'? Or are we just too primitive to see them?

What, then, does it really mean to be alone or not alone? If you are alone, are you by definition lonely – with the yearning that implies? What does yearning do to warp the results of an inquiry? In such a context, where so much is speculative anyway, I’m reminded of the mind-blowing stories of RA Lafferty. These do not strive for realism but in their surreal approach are perhaps more useful than “hard science fiction” in expanding possibilities about alien life.

In one of Lafferty’s tales, Nine Hundred Grandmothers, an expedition discovers that the intelligent aliens on the planet they’re exploring are matriarchal, and that every female member of this alien species is still alive. In a remarkable scene, the protagonist passes through ever-smaller subterranean caverns to meet the original alien matriarch. Whether or not this is a plausible real-world scenario, it definitely trumps, and is more useful in thinking about extra-terrestrials, than a prediction of “bear-sized” aliens or comparisons to the ancient Babylonians.



Ursula K Le Guin’s classic Vaster Than Empires, and More Slow extrapolates in a different direction, telling the story of an expedition to a distant planet where sentience takes the form of plant life. Only one member of the expedition recognises this sentience, because to the others the context in which it exists is faulty.

Similarly, in Dmitri Bilenkin’s Crossing of the Paths, a 1970s story from the Soviet Union, the divide between the alien and human is extreme. Bilenkin’s story describes an encounter on a distant planet between a human expedition in a vehicle sent out from a spaceship and an alien species known as the mangr. The mangr looks like a huge thicket of bushes across a hillside.

In fact, it’s an intelligent collective, and nomadic to avoid the giant electrical storms that plague the landscape. The humans in their crawler try to drive right through the mangr, but become trapped because of a series of mistakes based on the standard assumptions one might make about the Earth version of a thicket.

During what follows, the crew never fully figure out that they’ve encountered intelligent alien life because the aims of the humans and of the aliens are so different. Nor do the aliens recognise that they’ve encountered intelligent life. In their alien context, they wouldn’t care if they did. Each reacts according to their nature and their precepts, and each is thus unaware of the other.



Thinking about these stories brings us back to a subset of questions contained within the main question “Are we alone?” Who are “we” and thus who are “they”?

Are we not alone if we find microorganisms on Mars, or is that somehow anticlimactic? Are we not alone if we find a random mammal contentedly munching on some form of vegetation on a planet orbiting a distant star? Or, are we only not alone if we find some form of life we deem truly intelligent? At what point is the switch flipped from “alone” to “not alone”? Would a satisfactory answer differ for the alien we might someday meet? Would the very idea of the question mean something radically different?

I would hope that 'Are we alone?' isn’t just the booster rocket for Manifest Destiny transformed

The hidden insatiability at the heart of the question makes me wonder, “are we just trying to avoid some other question?” And what would replace the question if we ever answered it in the affirmative? Would that answer be sufficient? If I’m not sure, it’s because I wonder if the question is itself wrapped up in rationalisations to continue the western drive for limitless expansion. In tackling the issue in Colonise Mars? Not until we learn some lessons here on earth Dr Danielle N Lee asks: “Is it right to think about the galaxy as a playground that is ours for the taking?”

I would hope that “Are we alone?” isn’t just the booster rocket for Manifest Destiny transformed. I’d hope that it’s also an expression of a genuine empathy and desire for discovery. Yet even empathy, like a telescope, can be directed on one place and ignore another entirely. And discovery, for human beings, has rarely meant anything as selfless as quenching a desire for contact and for pure knowledge. The famous “sense of wonder” in science fiction has often been achieved by ignoring flawed assumptions or simplifications embedded in the foundations of the story. In thinking of first contact, we often forget the tragedy and genocide this has brought to different groups of humans on Earth – usually at the expense of indigenous populations.

In a different context, also Earth-bound, only in recent campaigns to grant personhood to apes, dolphins, and other species do we see the beginning of awareness that human beings have never been alone. In 2010, Bolivia passed a law establishing the Rights of Mother Earth and acknowledged the “dynamic living system formed by the indivisible community of all life systems and living beings who are interrelated, interdependent, and complementary”. A law passed in New Zealand this year declared animals “sentient”, taking sentience to mean able to “experience positive and negative emotions”.

Recognition has been difficult for a number of reasons – our limited senses and particular ways of categorising the world are further stymied by encounters with the very different types of life that surround us. We’re only now beginning to realise, for example, that some sharks have complex social networks, which hints at a sophistication we’ve longed denied them. Fish, which we tend to see as inert objects, incapable of feeling pain, we now know interact in sophisticated ways. According to an article in Nature they can, among other things, “cooperate, cheat, and punish”. These findings are changing how we view brain evolution. Given confirmation bias, and studies that show we make fewer conscious decisions than previously thought, we can’t even be certain that aspects of the human imagination are not actually a series of set operating protocols and automated systems.

That may seem like a radical idea, and perhaps hard for some to believe. But it’s harder to discount examples of “alien” higher-order intelligence on our planet. Sy Montgomery’s recent The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration Into the Wonder of Consciousness provides evidence not only of octopus smarts, but of how different that intelligence is. An animal that sees through its skin and has a brain that may in part reside in its tentacles would never think like us. Neither would an alien from outer space that evolved in a similar way. Recognition of intent by the human brain is not guaranteed, and yet critical. We would need to recognise something not ourselves, not acting like ourselves, that yet has some form of sentience.

A circle looks at a square and sees a badly made circle. If we’re going to ask a question like “Are we alone?”, an awareness of our own inconsistent history, our own limitations, is important – and so too is a wider understanding of what exists all around us. But if our own recognition of intelligence is incomplete, how do we know that “we” constitute the kind of intelligence that another intelligence might recognise?

In other words, do we fulfill the very requirements we ask of “others”? The answer isn’t entirely clear.



•This is an edited version of an essay that appeared in longer form as a keynote speechgiven at the Arthur C Clarke Center for the Human Imagination’s Are We Alone? conference in June 2015.



• The Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer is available in paperback now.