Views from the Outside

Some thinky thoughts loosely derived from a conversation held in line for the Star Tours ride at Disneyland.

I wonder... if aliens were to visit Earth as tourists, what would they think of us ?

Would they look upon us with a sense of patronizing humor, the way that an adult lavishly praises a child's elaborately and carefully concocted mud pie or crayon drawing ?

Or would they look upon us with a sense of helpless pity, the way that someone driving home from work glances at a homeless man and his bony, dirt-ridden dog ?

Or would they look at us with a sense of complete and utter bafflement, the way that students respond to a teacher when she explains something that is entirely out of line with the flow of the lesson ?


Over the summer when I was teaching in Taiwan, one of the lessons that we shared with the students was the various holidays that we celebrate in the US. Maybe it's because I've grown up with Thanksgiving, Halloween, Christmas, St. Patricks Day, etc... but I've never really questioned these major American holidays. We grow up making paper pilgrims in preschool and drinking eggnog in elementary, listening to Christmas classics and scooping the goopy brains out of innocent pumpkins before stabbing geometric shapes into their dusty orange shells. We grow older and retain our enthusiasm for these special days-- even if it does mean that the pilgrims and pumpkins are replaced by consecutive beers. Yet still, we grow up, and we understand, that these are all very normal things to do at their given times of the year.

However, when we were explaining these holidays to our aboriginal Taiwanese students, many of them were  confused, and even cynical. Why do you have to wear green on St. Patrick's Day ? Why don't you just eat the pumpkin? Why is Santa always so fat?

These are incredibly difficult questions to answer; it's kind of like asking an Eskimo to explain snow. They've never had to explain it, because it's just always been there.

Just as these Taiwanese children were entirely foreign to the concept of American holidays, would aliens also be entirely baffled by these small shrines to the human experience that are, essentially, social constructs ? Perhaps they would look at our commercialized Christmas and raise an eyebrow or earbrow or whatever puzzlement-expressing anatomical feature they possess. Perhaps they would observe the drunken carousing of New Year's and completely miss the concept... because their planet rotates so slowly, and revolves around the sun so quickly, that a day and a year are essentially equivalent.

Even holidays that are generally self-explanatory, like Mother's Day, or Father's Day... maybe they reproduce asexually, and instead, they celebrate Mitosis Day, or Budding Day, or whatever. Happy Spawnday ! *throws confetti*

Even if they were to peel away the commercial layers of Christmas and decipher it down to its spiritual roots, would they understand the concept of religion ? Alien civilizations that have developed such advanced technology to travel beyond their star systems into ours must have reached a level of scientific understanding that has either confirmed or denied the veritability of the world's major religions (it would be pretty neat if they found a way to go back in time and interview Jesus).

Or, another interesting possibility...even if they had come to a science-based, all-inclusive-yes-or-no-conclusion on the concept of religion, that they still celebrate holidays for the sake of their own social constructs ?

Do aliens have religion ?

Alien civilizations, no matter how advanced at this point in time, would certainly have risen from similarly humble hunter-gathering backgrounds. In Earth's young era, religion was often used to explain the unexplainable-- cosmic phenomena, strange happenings, and natural disasters. To say that a civilization came to being entirely bereft of religion is a weighty claim, and I personally am very curious to see what types of global religions exist on alien planets. God created an entire universe, and being an artistic creator, I doubt that He would have played out the exact same story on all of his habitable planets. What other miracles of water and wine, or light and shadow, exist on these other worlds--each as unique as our own? And then from these, what types of customs, traditions, and holidays arose and evolved over the span of time ?

It's certainly baffling to think about.


[currently listening: Velvetine - The Great Divide (Seven Lions Remix)]