NICAP and other thoughts of life, the universe and everything (almost).

Did you notice the beautiful northern lights on the sky last night? First I mistook them for clouds but I soon realised they don't move that much. So there I was, standing on my balcony with not nearly enough clothes and stared at the green flames on the firmament with tears in my eyes (the piercing north wind had something to do with this reaction). The northern lights always make me feel like the gateway to a fantasy world is open and that I could have a chance to get there. Well, one can always hope.

There was also a maxim for the Geminid meteor shower. I had just finished my X-Files marathon an hour before (how can they go dividing one episode to two seasons?!) so my first thought had something to do with UFOs since I didn’t know there is a meteor shower. The actual maxim was between midnight and one a.m. and I was outside at three a.m. so in the end I only saw two Geminids but it was pretty impressive anyway.

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Watching the X-Files has made me think of the possibility of the existence of extraterrestrial biological entities which is different from UFOs. An example. Let us assume there is a planet somewhere beyond the boundaries of space we know. Let us assume further that their technological development is the same as ours and that they wonder the same questions we wonder. To them we would be extraterrestrial biological entities but we don’t have what they would see as unidentified flying objects because our technology is not developed enough for that kind of space travelling.

I can perfectly and without a question see the possibility of EBEs existing. It would be rather arrogant of us to think we are here alone, considering the fact that space is vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big place. I just cannot see why someone would want to travel millions of light years just to play doctor on us.

There are of course several explanations provided to answer this question. They might want to know our biological structure to figure out our weak spots since it’s always useful to know that about your enemy. Alas, according to this theory they would be hostile. Why would they be hostile towards us without a reason? Maybe they would have the same attitude as the planet Kricket whose people want to destroy anything outside their own planet, just because they’re not from their planet.

Another theory: There are no gods. Human race and everything else on the planet Earth was created by aliens. They abduct different species, among them humans, to restore their DNA and other building blocks in case we manage to destroy all the already endangered species, other animals and ourselves. According to this theory, they would want us to survive, I just cannot say why. Maybe they are capable of seeing the biodiversity of life and respect it and preserve its numerous varieties, the habitants of Earth included. That sounds much nicer than the previous one. Unfortunately, this would also mean that those fundamentalists would be right, with their ranting and raving about “intellectual design”. Well, at least it wouldn’t be their god.

Who knows, maybe we’ll know someday.

NICAP is, by the way, an acronym standing for National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena. Just in case someone wants to know.

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Now I need to start searching information about the Hawaiian grammar. In my linguistics test there is a section where we need to make sense of the structure and translations of the given language (which is Hawaiian as I checked). The problem is caused by the words meaning siblings. There are separate words for elder siblings, younger siblings and just siblings. More than that, the word seems to be chosen based on the speaker’s sex. If this were a correct assumption, it would allow the several different translations for the English sentences given in 3.3. However, this assumption would ruin my entire 3.2 answer (unless the teacher has included a trick question to the exam; she has given answer possibilities A and B, but what if the actual answer is, as my assumption suggests, C: neither?). Tricky, tricky, tricky. You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if the correct answer is C. It seems far too simple to just say that the speaker is male just because in the example sentence provided the speaker is male. There is no example of the same word said by a female speaker. I need to think about this a little further before handing in the exam.