The amazing speed of light an impossibly
distant galaxy has sent toward the posterity
we represent is astonishingly difficult to
balance by frail human minds. Brilliant
cerebrums whose understanding of
technical, scientific, mathematical models
of nature's dabbling in physics and gases
and organic potentials leave us gasping in
disbelief. But then, what do we mortals know?
Travelling through the organized chaos of
space and atmospheres we conclude from
spectroscopy and quantum mechanics - and
radio telescopes continually scanning the
immensity of the Universe still unfolding its
unknowable presence, we deduce that life
forms other than the familiar may indeed
exist. Beware, cautions the world's foremost
astrophysicist: some things are best left
as they appear; untouched mysteries.
Organisms may colonize other planets on
other galaxies in the vastness of the dark
surrounding us punctuated by brilliant pinpricks
of heavenly light. On solid or gaseous surfaces
holding life's molecular-organic promise, that
divine spark may have given life. Somewhere.
As close as a sister planet, as far as one of more
ancient derivation, the light of which, travelling
at 300,000 kps has taken 13-billion light-years
to be received on Earth, and recognized.
There can be no certitude, only a preternatural
twinge of possibility inferred by stellar-fixated
minds of genius whose knowledge has been
predicated upon those of rare insight of our race
from primeval times to the present. We exist,
why not, how not, other forms of intelligent
awareness. Of course, 13-billion years represents
an exhaustively-engaged time even when no one
is counting. And to traverse that distance in time
and icy, blank space represents a wearying affair.
So if we were to forward a message of greeting
trusting that at some primordial event amino
acids precipitated life, what guarantee it yet
remains? It is not without the bounds of
possibility that some capable life form has itself
messaged us out of a sense of non-human curiosity
and receiving no response, as we do not deign to
notice stray and puzzling appearances of strangely
fey creatures, but make haste to destroy what we
find fearfully offensive, we may never really know.
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