Christoph Niemann

A friend gets hundreds of likes for every Instagram photo. Is there any point in me liking her pics if she won't notice?

W. H. Auden (1907–1973) wrote a poem about Instagram: “Looking up at the stars, I know quite well / That for all they care, I can go to hell.” Clearly, this is about seeing your popular friend's picture and knowing that liking it won't matter because your affection will be buried in a landslide of other people's affection, not to mention all the bots and weird comments and stuff. It just won't matter.

But Auden goes on: Maybe that sort of power imbalance is inevitable, he writes—even desirable. Imagine if the stars in the sky really did care about us and needed our approval. What a burden that would be! Auden argues that there's a dignity in liking Instagram photos without any hope of reciprocation or connection. “If equal affection cannot be,” he writes, “let the more loving one be me.”

Brilliant, right? The guy really understood Instagram.

[#contributor: /contributors/590952c676f462691f012777]|||is an author, most recently of * [Wild Ones](http://www.amazon.com/Wild-Ones-Sometimes-Dismaying-Reassuring/dp/0143125370/)*. You should take his advice.|||

If I encounter an alien life-form, do I have an obligation to report it, or can I keep the experience private?

Good Lord, I had trouble thinking this one through.

First thing I did was call Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at SETI. He laughed and said, “You're certainly not obligated to report it: There's no law, there's no policy. Nobody forces you to report that any more than you're forced to report a sighting of a ghost or a leprechaun. But if you don't tell anybody else, it's just your story. And if nobody can verify what you saw, it's not that meaningful … So if you didn't tell, it wouldn't do much good. And if you did tell someone, it usually doesn't do much good anyway because there's usually very thin evidence.” I took this to mean that as far as he's concerned, it doesn't matter what you do—because you probably didn't see anything anyway. To me, this is an argument for keeping it to yourself: It's probably nothing.

But then I called Mufon, the Mutual UFO Network, an organization that compiles and investigates these claims. (You say it this way: “Moo-FAWN.”) Mufon's communications director, Roger Marsh, was adamant: Yes, you should report it. Mufon needs you to report it. “It's hard to study UFOs,” he said. Mufon is trying to make a rigorous scientific study of extraterrestrial sightings, but their sample size is inevitably very small; they need more people to come forward out of the darkness. And the more people who do, the less ridiculed they'll be—the less lonely they'll feel. And the easier it will be for the next person. This is a pretty good argument for reporting what you saw: It just might be something.

But no one thinks of these encounters from the alien's point of view—the risk that creature took, to fly beyond its frontiers and reveal itself to you. Maybe it took you aboard for a quick surgical analysis. And for what? When it returns and reports to the monarchs or venture capitalists that bankrolled its voyage, what sort of deliverables will it have to impress them? Maybe mass hysteria on our part is the only way to make alien investors feel they're getting their money's worth.

Which is to say, maybe—just maybe—reporting an alien visitation actually encourages more alien encounters. Anyway, those are the facts, as best I can puzzle them out. I lean toward reporting. But now, at least, you can make an informed decision.