We Were Being Watched

I don’t remember where I first read or heard of this notion, or who deserves credit for it, but with the recent release of government UFO footage, the escalating conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, and the political divide in the United States driven partly by the evangelical trend, I thought I would try to paraphrase something I think I came across a long time ago. Maybe it was from an episode of the Twilight Zone, but I’m not sure.

It is almost certain that other forms of intelligent life exist in the universe, and our imaginations are severely limited by our own dull minds when it comes to describing intelligence. Perhaps the Earth has been under surveillance by creatures from other galaxies for as long as humans have walked this planet, but we haven’t noticed them because they carry on in a different dimension of time. Yet they can observe us. To them, our 10,000 years pass in what seems to them to be a year. They have no interest in being worshipped or intervening in the daily lives of humans. They do not administer justice, punish evil, reward good, or otherwise pass judgment on the behaviors of we inferior human creatures on Earth. But they do act in one godlike way.

Just like ten year olds who keep pet lizards in glass cages as pets and feed them crickets while making observations of their actions, when these extraterrestrials came upon Earth and found it inhabited by lower forms of life, they thought they could amuse themselves by conducting a short (in their timeframe) experiment, and watch for a year or so (10,000 years or so in Earth time) to see what happened. Using their superior powers, they decided to invent religion, and came up with several dozen slight variations to be introduced discretely in different regions to different peoples around the globe. They thought it would be fun to hang out hovering above the planet as the human population grew, and as people with different religious views came into contact with each other to watch how they dealt with their religious differences. The extraterrestrials intentionally designed all the religious variations with a common core but for each had twists on the mythical stories of how the Earth began, the number and names of deities, the details of certain miracles and where they may or may not have taken place, and what the nature of existence after death was. But fundamental to each and every religion was the concept of kindness, generosity, and reason. To the extraterrestrials, the other details were entertaining but ultimately trivial.

From their spacecraft the creatures from another galaxy placed wagers. Some hypothesized that as humans became more civilized and cultures intermingled, they would recognize and celebrate the common core of their different religions, and form bonds around that core. Others bet that humans would become obsessed with and cling to the trivial differences, make them matters of life and death, allow them to divide the planet, and keep them forever in conflict.

From the very start it looked like those betting on disunity were right. But the others argued that humans deserved credit for being able to learn, and it would take time for them to recognize that basically all their religions were founded on the same principles. But the extraterrestrials had other solar systems in other galaxies to explore and many, they hoped, would be populated by wiser, more interesting creatures to observe. How much time should they give these Earthlings? And did they really want to hover around and watch humans destroy each other over these trivial differences?

The extraterrestrials were also becoming concerned with the degradation of the planet, and worried that before they could witness the final outcome of their experiment the planet might not be able to continue to support life. They were also shocked to view the Earth through their megaverdian lenses, which displayed the extreme imbalance of the distribution of resource consumption around the planet. Ultimately those betting that humans would learn to live in unity conceded that, although a final conclusion hadn’t been reached, it did not look good for Earth, and it was time to resign from the wager and move on to more interesting worlds.