We all have two conflicting psychological needs. The need for privacy and solitude, and the need for company and connection.
WTF? Who designed that quirk? How many people are institutionalised when that delicate balance fails? How many die? At the extremes of such an imbalance live psychopaths and tyrants.
It is inescapable. Protection and procreation are both needed for survival. It’s in our chemistry. Every feeling, every urge and every action is transmitted between our brain cells across tiny gaps called synapses and this connection is purely chemical. You have 100 billion brain cells. One for every star in the galaxy. Each of them can have thousands of synapses, all connected by chemical interactions.
You are chemistry, and chemistry achieves its aims by subterfuge. Without it however, almost all medications would be useless, and consciousness itself would not exist.
You cannot escape this. All the chemicals, hormones and other bodily fluids contain traces of your chemistry. You know it. Your doctors just love blood tests.
Every kiss, every handshake, every inhaled breath bears the chemical signature of those you have touched and others around you. You have probably already inhaled some of the same molecules of air that were previously inhaled by Genghis Khan, Jesus Christ and Adolf Hitler. Look at how much trouble we had to go through to control the transmission of Covid, but without victory.
When I worked as an electrical trades assistant years ago, my workmates and I started going to the Bald-Faced Stag in Leichhardt. A nice pub not too far from work. We found a cosy table up against the wall and that became our usual spot in the pub. The seats were a bit worn and there were a couple of stains on the wall but that was no problem.
One day one of the regulars commented to me that I was sitting in Kenny’s seat. Apparently Kenny had been a long time regular there and had recently passed away. He used to sit in that chair and rest his head against the wall and after years of doing that, left a stain on the wall just from the normal oils in the hair and skin.
I thought about that, and I thought about the fact that we are all chemistry and I wondered how many minute traces of Kenny’s feelings and emotions had insinuated into the chemistry of his body right to the extremes of every hair on his head and how much of that had been absorbed into the wall of that pub. There must have been something of the essence of Kenny left there. Hair is an excellent reservoir of chemicals, and even contains detailed forensic information.
Now Kenny was gone but just by resting my head against the mark left by him our chemistry had met. You might think this feeling is far fetched but maybe I was thinking about it because of the need for connection. Of course I was at the pub with mates, but the idea of an unconscious and impalpable connection with a person I had never met fascinated me.
Two weeks later the walls had been scrubbed clean. Kenny was gone.
But not completely because we are all connected. You have two parents, four grandparents and so on. If you go back 5,000 years we all have the same set of ancestors. If you entered any village on Earth around 3,000 B.C., the first person you met would probably be one of your ancestors.
It also means that all of us have ancestors of every colour and creed. Every Palestinian suicide bomber has Jews in his past family. Every Sunni Muslim in Iraq is descended from at least one Shiite. And every Ku Klux Klansman’s family has some African roots. Millions of people today are descended from William the Conqueror or Genghis Khan.
The need for communication is very powerful. Think of how much more enjoyment is had at a live performance in a theatre compared to watching the same thing on TV at home alone. A meal with a friend, a walk, a tour through a gallery. An experience of any kind shared is usually better for it.
Sometimes however, you just want to be left alone, don’t you? You look away from passing strangers, walk along the outside edge of the footpath, hang up the ringing phone, lock the door and disappear beneath the blankets.
I still think that connection tips the balance. The monumental edifices of art, music and literature are testament to this just as much as the number of pets in households around the world. Nature documentaries are extraordinarily popular. There are even channels on Foxtel where the amount of time taken up by nature documentaries almost equals the amount of time taken up by advertisements.
Plants communicate with each other too. Plants exchange information with one another and with other organisms such as insects. Think of the scent of newly mowed grass or crushed sage. Some of the chemicals that make up these aromas will tell other plants to prepare for an attack or to summon predatory insects to defend them.
There is then the urge to find other civilisations, not just in our past but on other worlds. Strangely, we have laws against unsolicited contact between people and yet governments spend millions of dollars on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Our relationship with aliens has been a rocky one even though we have never met one, apart from the occasional regional American who has been gently probed in a UFO.
Even our more recent science fiction movies have depicted aliens in a positive light as often as in a negative one.
The question of the existence of alien civilisations has been considered for some time but was most notably expressed by the physicist Enrico Fermi and is known as the Fermi paradox. Fermi was working on atomic fission and built the first atomic fission reactor in 1942 in a squash court under a university in Chicago so it’s just as well that nothing went wrong otherwise Chicago would be a huge crater to this day.
Fermi observed that given the number of stars and planets the odds would be in favour of the existence of other civilisations in the galaxy but will we ever meet one? I don’t think so.
Life has existed on earth for about 3.5 billion years. Intelligent life capable of communicating with other intelligent life has only existed for about 100 years, the time since we mastered radio communication.
Imagine you had a stick 1 km long and this represented 3.5 billion years of life. The 100 years of life capable of communication with other stars would be represented by a little red stripe 0.7 mm wide at the end of the 1 km long rod.
Now imagine that you had 1000 such rods, each one representing a possible alien civilisation, and that you took all of these rods up in a large aircraft and dropped them to the ground at the same time. I don’t think there is any chance that any two of those little red stripes would line up together. So, there could be aliens out there but they will either be so far behind us or so far ahead of us that communication will be impossible.
They will certainly not be short hairless creatures with egg shaped heads and almond shaped eyes.
The other problem with extraterrestrial life is that perhaps there is none. Here on earth there are three domains of living creatures. The bacteria, the archaea and the eukarya. The first two are comprised of single celled organisms called prokaryotes that have barely evolved at all in 3.5 billion years.
The eukarya includes all the animals and plants, and are made of more complex eukaryotic cells that contain a nucleus and mitochondria and various other subcellular organelles. The best definition of the eukarya is everything that has ever appeared on a David Attenborough film.
The problem is that nobody knows how prokaryotes gave rise to eukaryotes and this process might be so rare that it has only ever happened once.
Only once.
Only here.
Ever.
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