The Ghost in the Darkness

The Ghost in the Darkness

There is a middle-of-the-road ($75 million in box office) film from 1996 that stars Michael Douglas and Val Kilmer called The Ghost and the Darkness. It is the story of two man-eating lions that ravage and terrorize a crew of workers building the Uganda to Mombasa rail line through the village of Tsavo. It is a true story with a somewhat stylized script and tells about how Lt. Colonel Patterson (Kilmer), a military engineer, fails to kill the offending demon lions and is finally helped in the effort by famed African big-game hunter Charles Remington (Douglas). It is an exciting story that blends our natural fear of large predator mammals and the dynamic tension of men trying to take charge of the natural environment in one of the last great wilderness areas of the world. It all happened in 1898 and the film was in theaters a century later.

The theme of that movie is a little hard to understand because it has a mystical quality about it. On the one hand, the lions are mysterious beasts that seem to come and go with a degree of ease and inflicting great harm on the crew and imbedding fear in the hearts of everyone including the audience. On the other hand, one can say that the arrogance or the lions pales in comparison to the arrogance of man in the form of Patterson first and Remington in the end. Man is fundamentally unable to bow to nature in any way. He may accept defeat in any number of battles, against beasts, geography or weather, but man never admits defeat in the war against nature. In fact, you might say that the overriding nature of man is that he expects, aspires and commits to dominate nature in most any way in which he is thrust into confrontation with it. There are certainly stories where man shrinks back from nature in fear, but his retreat is almost always followed by some scheme to take his revenge and show nature who is boss.

Recently, I downloaded the audiobook by Avi Loeb, the Israeli-American astrophysicist who currently heads up the Harvard Astronomy Department. He calls that book Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth. There is no mistaking the subject of a book with that name. It is about the 2017 discovery of Oumuamua, the name given in honor of the listening station in Hawaii which discovered it, to a relatively small interstellar object passing through our solar system, indeed, the first interstellar object to ever be discovered in our solar system from another solar system. There is a lot to unpack in that information. To begin with, who knew that we’ve never had something (asteroid, comet, Coke bottle) come into our solar system from another solar system? I guess I always figured that there was all sorts of detritus that has found its way into our solar system at one time or another. I also figured that we have had for some time a data-gathering capability that would certainly record all the cosmic junk that might appear to come near us. To learn that this was THE FIRST interstellar object ever discovered and then to learn that we only found it as it was already moving away from us was quite surprising and somewhat disappointing.

I’m sure that I do not know the half of what is involved in scanning all that open space in our solar system, especially in its outer reaches. But this object came all the way into the nearby sun orbit past the orbits of Earth, Venus and Mercury, and then away from the sun past Mercury, Venus and Earth again. This path did not get transgressed in a hot moment, it took a leisurely few months to make its near path past Earth (twice) and then out of the solar system. In defense of our astronomy community, Oumuamua, has been characterized as “small and dark”, but its oblong shape is simply too unusual for an interstellar object (I’m not sure the basis for understanding that normality in the absence of prior objects). It has the dark red coloring of outer solar system and deep space objects, but it was also measured as unusually reflective of sunlight, implying that it might well have been metallic or some similar substance. It’s measured acceleration could not be mathematically or astrophysically calculated and attributed to the gravitational forces of the sun or the nearby planets.

After two years of study of the available data, most astronomers have declared Oumuamua to be a natural object, but several, including Avi Loeb are more compelled to say that the object is more likely the product of some form of alien technology. The “We are not alone” realization is incredibly hard for humans (including astronomers) to get their heads around and that realization is not helped by the history of people being relegated to kook status for suggesting anything extraterrestrial that seems like of alien origin. We may be ready to make countless movies with the science fiction and fantasy themes that comport with alien life, but we mere mortals in our day-to-day lives do not know how to process that information and know what to do with it. In a strange way, we can more easily grapple with the finality of a natural apocalypse, whether from our own Earthbound idiocy or from some extraterrestrial event than we can handle the infinite possibilities associated with an unnatural or alien incursion into our world. While we have never experienced an extinction level event in our species lifetime, we all believe it is possible and perhaps even likely at some point (hopefully not in our or our grandchildren’s lifetime). Being overrun by and dealing with aliens is simply unfathomable.

I haven’t yet finished the Avi Loeb book, but look forward to doing so soon. I doubt he will reach any conclusions with specificity that will change my life, but he has raised my consciousness of this evidence and I, for one, am prepared to believe that Oumuamua may have been an object of alien origin. I have always believed that we are not alone and that the likelihood of life elsewhere is high. I do find the thought that human life may be proven to be unremarkable much harder to accept. This is not the type of arrogance that others who feel man will always dominate nature exhibit, but it is an affirmation of my belief in humanity, with all its flaws. I believe there is extreme value in any lifeform that can embody the grace to empathize with all other life and can accept the right of life to exist no matter how divergent it may be with our own human form. That may not be unique in the universe, but I will posit that there is not much that could be more evolved than that sentiment.

Oumuamua has come and gone and may never come our way again. As an object only identified when it was 21 million miles away and going away from us, it was at best a spectral form. It was a cosmic ghost and it carried on in its darkness into the darkness of space. I may never hear anything more compelling about extraterrestrials during my lifetime, but I will carry on with a firm belief that there will be other ghosts in the darkness that will come our way and we had better get used to that notion, assuming we don’t destroy ourselves as a species in the meantime.