The New Religion

Lately, too many scientists have been pushing Aristotle's version of the universe...godlike entities living in the heavens with inferior creatures eking out a miserable existence in the muck and mire beneath their feet...but instead of Gods, modern science wax's poetic about extraterrestrials.

Some of them don't fool me at all. There's big bucks to be made professing the belief that someday soon we'll meet Yoda. Coming from highly educated men and women of science, this credo is lent an aura of authenticity far beyond it's means. The Fermi Constant held steady for a time (the universe is 12 billion years old, therefore some civilizations would have had an 8 billion year head start on us. Traveling at half the speed of light, which by the way is something we ourselves could do right now, they'd have colonized the Milky Way Galaxy billions of years ago, so where are they?), but then the B movies about aliens came along, and the killer was the proliferation of television. You can't swing an old, dead, boring, porcine without running into one "science" channel or another preaching the probability of alien contact.

But some of it comes from switching deities. Or dieties as one recent headline of an email to me read, but for now we'll stick with gods over cholesterol. Many modern day scientists were raised to be religious, then their intellect took over. Intellect struggled with emotion, and a new religion was born. In this new religion, there's an awful lot of the old religion going on. Super-intelligent beings live in the sky, and even Hawking says we shouldn't mess with them, for to do so would prove disasterous.

Fermi was right. With such a lead, where the hell are they. None of the current crop of star-worshippers seems to be able to explain this.

But I do SO want to believe, I truly do. I cut my teeth on science fiction, but was fortunate to have learned the difference between science fiction and science fantasy. As I grew to adulthood, I'd submit one tale after another to Analog or whatever pulp magazine was accepting unsolicited stories, and was told more than once that I was drifting into science fantasy and should take care not to make a habit of it. Nowadays, that doesn't matter, at least not for the masses. Loud, fiery explosions in space and faster-than-light travel are so prolific as to be boring, accepted as gospel, but remain quite impossible.

Once upon a time, science would scream to the high heavens about terrible theatrical presentations such as the Star Wars franchise. Now they pray to these same heavens for their newfound deities to stop by for some coffee and.