“Hey, I think I found some place where I don’t have to worry about COVID-19, riots, car accidents, plane crashes, product warnings, and incessant punditry, that last thing probably the most vexing of modern ailments.”
“Where’s that? Middle of Australia?”
“How’d you guess? Well, not really the middle, a little bit west of middle. Anyway, it’s not in Australia at all, but rather what people in the outback of Australia found.”
“Huh?”
“There’s a widespread array of radio receivers, some dipole antennas spread across the Australian outback, that looks like a bunch of spiders; it’s called the Murchison Widefield Array. So, get this. They—I don’t know them, but they are some of those elite science ‘theys’ that study stuff I can’t really explain—anyway, they looked at ten million stars in a patch of sky without finding any trace of technological life.* Get it? No life exuding radio waves, specifically messages or music broadcast on FM bands. A life-void. Nothing. Nada. Just stars and planets and stuff, but no sign of any alien life. That’s the place where nothing bad happens because for something ‘bad’ to happen, there have to be life-forms that recognize that something ‘bad’ can happen.”
“Yeah, but if you go there and pick any planet orbiting one of those ten million stars, won’t you be the someone who can expect something ‘bad’? Won’t you by your very presence open the possibility, nay, even the probability that something ‘bad’ will of necessity happen? How about my using the word nay? Always wanted to use that with the words possibility and probability.”
“But when I get to one of those uninhabited, undefiled places…”
“You’ll take the bad stuff with you. Don’t you see? You can’t escape the bad stuff if the bad stuff is inherent, if its existence is endemic to humans, or, in fact, to any life-form. Life processes include ‘bad’ processes with ‘bad’ outcomes. And on your trip to those distant havens of imagined ‘good’ stuff, you can add that anxiety you’ll have, especially when you get to a section of the universe that seems to be devoid of life. I mean, what if ‘they’ were wrong in their assessment that those ten million solar systems are devoid of life? What if the life is hiding like an Australian funnel-web spider, waiting for you to walk by and then…well, then, that’s when the ‘bad’ happens. Don’t the ‘theys’ that operate the Murchison Widefield Array have to worry about stepping near a funnel-web spider on their way to check their metallic spiders?”
“I see. I guess I’ll just stay on Earth, then. But what if I permanently self-quarantine?”
“And what kind of life is that? Talk about a life-void, or, rather, a ‘living-void’; that’s one in my estimation, and it’s one you don’t have to travel light-years to find.”
*Tremblay, C.D. and S. J. Tingay. A SETI Survey of the Vela Region using the Murchison Widefield Array: Orders of Magnitude Expansion in Search Space. Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia (PASA) doi: 10.1017/pas.2020.xxx. Online at https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.03267.pdf
“Where’s that? Middle of Australia?”
“How’d you guess? Well, not really the middle, a little bit west of middle. Anyway, it’s not in Australia at all, but rather what people in the outback of Australia found.”
“Huh?”
“There’s a widespread array of radio receivers, some dipole antennas spread across the Australian outback, that looks like a bunch of spiders; it’s called the Murchison Widefield Array. So, get this. They—I don’t know them, but they are some of those elite science ‘theys’ that study stuff I can’t really explain—anyway, they looked at ten million stars in a patch of sky without finding any trace of technological life.* Get it? No life exuding radio waves, specifically messages or music broadcast on FM bands. A life-void. Nothing. Nada. Just stars and planets and stuff, but no sign of any alien life. That’s the place where nothing bad happens because for something ‘bad’ to happen, there have to be life-forms that recognize that something ‘bad’ can happen.”
“Yeah, but if you go there and pick any planet orbiting one of those ten million stars, won’t you be the someone who can expect something ‘bad’? Won’t you by your very presence open the possibility, nay, even the probability that something ‘bad’ will of necessity happen? How about my using the word nay? Always wanted to use that with the words possibility and probability.”
“But when I get to one of those uninhabited, undefiled places…”
“You’ll take the bad stuff with you. Don’t you see? You can’t escape the bad stuff if the bad stuff is inherent, if its existence is endemic to humans, or, in fact, to any life-form. Life processes include ‘bad’ processes with ‘bad’ outcomes. And on your trip to those distant havens of imagined ‘good’ stuff, you can add that anxiety you’ll have, especially when you get to a section of the universe that seems to be devoid of life. I mean, what if ‘they’ were wrong in their assessment that those ten million solar systems are devoid of life? What if the life is hiding like an Australian funnel-web spider, waiting for you to walk by and then…well, then, that’s when the ‘bad’ happens. Don’t the ‘theys’ that operate the Murchison Widefield Array have to worry about stepping near a funnel-web spider on their way to check their metallic spiders?”
“I see. I guess I’ll just stay on Earth, then. But what if I permanently self-quarantine?”
“And what kind of life is that? Talk about a life-void, or, rather, a ‘living-void’; that’s one in my estimation, and it’s one you don’t have to travel light-years to find.”
*Tremblay, C.D. and S. J. Tingay. A SETI Survey of the Vela Region using the Murchison Widefield Array: Orders of Magnitude Expansion in Search Space. Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia (PASA) doi: 10.1017/pas.2020.xxx. Online at https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.03267.pdf
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