The Invasion Begins.

I am sitting in my hotel room in Pasadena trying to recapture fleeting memories of last night's dream. The renegade alarm clock decided to go off in the middle of my story so things are a bit fuzzy. I had to blindly grope and do a Helen Keller in the darkness and push every available button to turn the freaking thing off.

My dream started with air force jets scrambling overhead. The Martians had thousands of fried egg shaped ships dotting the mid day sky. Earthlings immediately assumed that the alien's venture to our planet was a provocative move of aggression and decided to blast them out of the sky. I hope that it wasn't in fact some sort of a galactic good will mission. I ended up crowded into a huge sterile yellow gymnasium with fellow earthling members of my coffee klatch, principally my friend and dentist Ron Allison and his kids.

Now I don't know if the alien interlopers had evil intentions or not but started thinking about a few things in the immediate aftermath of my journey. Human beings would always assume that the visitation would be hostile because, well that is how we treat other species here on earth. Except for a few examples stuck in cramped and concrete zoos, it makes it a lot easier to rid the planet of sentient competition, unless of course they are something we can harvest and eat. I had a dentist from Alaska and his family in the gallery last week extolling the virtues of shooting wolves from helicopters. They just don't fit in our plans. So the big bad alien is expected to wipe us off the planet with as little regard as we would have when we wipe the ants off the picnic table with a wet paper towel.

It also struck me that we tend to visualize extra planetary kin in our own image. Why bipeds, when there are so many different possible forms that life can take? Could not a super intelligence exist as a virus or an arachnid shape? We were defined by millions of years of evolution, shaped by the specific gravity, mean temperature and proximity of earth to the sun. The length of our limbs, our speech mechanism, all earth centric adaptations that we would only coincidentally share with alien species. An intelligent life form might just as well communicate in some telepathic way like an ant colony. Are we actually missing some space critter out there because of our narcissistic myopia and lack of vision?

Can you imagine the damage an alien visit would have on our theologic foundations? Talk about turning the whole universe upside down.  Here's hoping.  Harpers Magazine this month notes that a British Astronomer has identified 37,964 planets in the Milky Way that are "sufficiently hospitable to harbor life forms" and that 361 of these are likely home to intelligent civilizations.

Anyway I was woken up prematurely and can't really tell you the ending. Maybe we survived. Hopefully the interstellar invaders were bringing cake and cookies. And maybe they weren't met with shotgun totin rednecks with their pump action 870's - eat some hot earth lead, space boys!