The search for extraterrestrial intelligence simultaneously inscribes itself within the domains of science, art, and the paranormal. Yet, whether we are dealing with astrobiology, science fiction, or superstition, each of these domains operates with a particular concept of ‘alienness’ that shapes its representations. This concept pertains to a form of extraterrestrial life that appears to mimic contemporary human civilization both psychologically and technologically, even if the supposed alien species is said to far surpass humanity in these aspects. What makes such mimicry problematic is not that it touches on the question of extraterrestrial intelligence, but rather that it presupposes a type of alien intelligence that is essentially all too human.

One can indeed argue that the idea of extraterrestrial intelligence, as it dominates the collective imagination, is confused at the level of its conceptual structure. Once we take a closer look at what we must presuppose about nature to conceive of something like aliens, we find that this alien image results from a tacit conceptual decision on how nature works. This conceptual decision, however, is not the only possibility, and abandoning it in favor of its alternative results in an ontological argument against the existence of aliens. The argument can be summarized as follows: if one assumes that nature is geared toward the production of difference rather than similarity, then there is no reason why any natural being that exists on this planet should also exist on another planet, regardless of how many suitable biochemical conditions for life the infinite universe may offer.

 

The paradox of human exceptionalism

In 1968, the Swiss author Erich von Däniken published Chariots of the Gods? Unsolved Mysteries of the Past, which popularized the hypothesis that aliens interfered with human history and evolution. According to von Däniken, all ancient mythology and theology involving one or multiple deities, such as the Sumerian and Egyptian mythologies or the Hebrew Bible, are, in fact, documentation of real events that took place when extraterrestrial beings visited primitive earthlings and gave us scientific knowledge and technology. Von Däniken’s belief in ‘paleo-contact’ is as unshakeable as it is imaginative: the Nazca lines are interpreted as landing sites for alien spacecraft, the Piri Reis map is said to have been drawn by creatures who could see the Earth from space, and Biblical texts are taken to be documentation of genetic manipulations by extraterrestrial visitors. What is interesting about von Däniken is not the question of empirical validity of his claims, but rather the image of the “alien” presupposed therein. His concept of alienness coincides with the one that governs the popular understanding of extraterrestrial intelligence, and this image presents itself as self-evident in that it is tacitly presupposed by both alien-enthusiasts and sceptics.

The particularity of this image lies in the special role it assigns to a specific type of intelligence—one that is not just any kind of intelligence, but that somehow mirrors human intelligence. The extraterrestrial mimics human curiosity in exploring and experimenting with nature, achieving these ends through technology. The underlying presupposition of technology not only implies a concept of society but, above all, a society that mirrors the sociological conditions for the production of technology as they exist on Earth. That is to say, there must be some form of scientific institution and a concept of economy enabling the scientific practices within those institutions. Accordingly, what is presupposed is also a course of history that satisfied the conditions necessary for such sociological and epistemic apparatuses to emerge. Even if the imagined extraterrestrial civilization is far superior to ours, to the extent that it functions as an organized technological society, it must still have met the minimal requirements for such a society. This includes a complex and organized form of intersubjective effort in the production of technological means for the attainment of practical ends. To the extent that such activity requires resources and decision-making, it presupposes an economy and politics. And, as the social sciences teach us, the presence of these two domains is necessarily accompanied by conflict, which historically translates into war. We must therefore assume, as popular cinema often does, that the extraterrestrial civilization achieved its peak as a result of a painstaking historical evolution, in which it underwent its own progressive process of amelioration, with all the stages of trial and error, before reaching its state of technological and cultural completion. In this sense, the idea of an extraterrestrial civilization is modelled after the idea of a terrestrial civilization.

Von Däniken is unwittingly led to such modeling or doubling of terrestrial civilization, when he repeats what is essentially the main and most popular argument for belief in aliens, namely the idea that the vastness of the universe and the existence of an infinity of Earth-like planets implies that intelligent life must have evolved elsewhere. In popular discourse, this argument subsists in a negative form, that is, in terms of inconceivability: “It is inconceivable,” so the argument goes, “that among all those infinite planets and stars, we should be the only ones to have evolved to be intelligent.” In von Däniken’s book, the same argument is presented in a positive formulation: after sketching the vast number of stars and planets in the universe, von Däniken writes that “if we follow the hypothesis of the biochemist Dr. S. Miller, life and the conditions essential for life may have developed more quickly on some of these planets than on Earth. If we accept this daring assumption, civilizations more advanced than our own could have developed on 100,000 planets.”[i] Since the publication of von Däniken’s book, the exact figure has changed, but the idea itself remains intact.

The problem with this line of reasoning is not related to the logical coherence of von Däniken’s thought. On the contrary, the logic of the argument rather seems to be sound. The fact of our own existence does indeed imply the possibility of similar entities having evolved under similar conditions elsewhere. The problem, however, arises from the fact that this very logic is embedded in a framework of thought that is fixated on identity. The argument that infers extraterrestrial intelligence from the great number of planets suitable to produce life presupposes that nature is geared towards the production of similarities. In other words, this view assumes that nature functions according to the mechanical repetition of the same: similar conditions as those on Earth are repeated elsewhere, and this repetition produces a similar outcome—namely, something that is in some essential way similar to humanity, but still ‘differs’ from it because of its own unique identity. The reason I put ‘differs’ in scare quotes is that, upon closer inspection, the difference it involves—the difference of the alien identity with respect to our own human identity—is not essential, but accidental.

Let us examine the precise meaning of this claim. Following Aristotelian metaphysics, any existing entity can be described in terms of essential and accidental qualities. Essential qualities are those that distinguish it from other things. For example, a human being is a Homo sapiens or a rational animal, meaning that it is an entity that differentiates itself from all other things by virtue of its animality and further distinguishes itself from other animals by virtue of its rationality. Thus, animality and rationality together comprise the essential qualities of the human being in relation to everything else. Aside from these essential qualities, an existing entity also possesses accidental qualities—those qualities that can be removed without altering the nature of the thing itself. Thus, the entity that is both animal and rational may have either white or black skin, but these qualities are accidental in the sense that they do not essentially determine the kind of being we are dealing with. The rational animal, therefore, remains human regardless of its accidental attributes such as skin color.

The kind of reasoning that infers from the existence of a vast multitude of planets the existence of an alien life-form, goes as follows: if nature successfully produced a rational animal on Earth, then it may also produce a rational animal on conditions similar to Earth. Here, the supposed alien life-form is thought to be characterized by the same essence as the human being: rational animality. In other words, it posits an extra-terrestrial human being. If aliens are to be truly different from humans, that is to say, in such a way that their identity becomes a difference in essence, then they are to be conceived as either without animality or without rationality. Alternatively, they can also have a different nature if they possess some essential quality lacked by humans, in addition to animality and rationality. This, however, would make them to us what we are to non-human animals. But then there remains no reason to associate them with those elements of civilization that arise from the conjunction and tension of animality and rationality, which—as suggested by Nietzsche, Marx and Freud, those “masters of suspicion”[ii]—is the main driving force of history, politics, science, and civilization more broadly.

That there is something particularly human in the conventional concept of extra-terrestrial intelligence is further reflected by how our imagination seems to only be able to conceive of alien conduct by modeling them on contemporary scientific humans. The ‘Grey man’ aliens, which represent the most widespread conventional idea of an alien maintained in the economy of the collective imaginary, all behave like scientists: they use their superior technology to observe us, mirroring how we humans observe subjects in an experimental setting. Occasionally, they might abduct a human or two for experimentation, but these abductions only seem to occur for the sake of knowledge rather than malice. The alien image thus not only mirrors the interests and motivations of a human scientist—who serves as the very archetype for the model of ‘intelligent life’—but it also mirrors concrete perceptual and cognitive faculties that are presupposed in human scientific endeavors. Such faculties entail, among others, the ability to objectify, which, from a phenomenological point of view, cannot be separated from the genesis of representational thought ties to the evolutionary contingencies of the Homo sapiens.[iii] This representational thought, in turn, is the foundation of all natural science and human technology, and although it by no means exhausts the domain of human intelligence, it is particularly this aspect of our consciousness that we isolate and project onto a hypothetical entity we talk about as ‘intelligent aliens’. This projection can be compared to Feuerbach’s thesis on the origin of the idea of God, in which the highest unrealizable ideals are externalized and projected onto an imaginary entity, to which we then subjugate ourselves. It is in this sense fitting that von Däniken, as the title of his book suggests, associates extraterrestrials with pre-modern depictions of divinity. The fact that this dialectic with the divine is concealed by a naturalistic discourse, suggests a mutation of Feuerbach’s thesis. It should nevertheless be noted  that the  primacy of immanence over transcendence as suggested by von Däniken’s naturalistic discourse is illusory, since it does not eliminate divine transcendence, but merely disguises it in natural terms. As long as aliens contain only those qualities which singularize humans, the distinction between aliens and humans can only consist in accidental attributes, such as their appearance, language, culture, and so on. In this case, however, they differ no more from humanity in general than an Asian differs from a European.

Hence, the hidden paradox of von Däniken’s plea for humility: “We—the paragons of creation?—took 400,000 years to reach our present state and our present stature. Who can produce concrete proof to show why another planet should not have provided more favorable conditions for the development of other or similar intelligences? Is there any reason why we may not have ‘competitors’ on another planet who are equal or superior to us?”[iv] —and elsewhere: “The time has come for us to admit our insignificance by making discoveries in the infinite unexplored cosmos.”[v] The paradox of this claim consists in its self-refuting nature. On the one hand, the supposed plausibility of the “development of other or similar intelligences” is engendered by an affirmation of our own cosmic insignificance—a ‘naturalistic’ step that seemingly takes distance from the traditional anthropocentrism. On the other hand, what this insignificance ends up doing is precisely affirming the existence of a life form that imitates or repeats the human difference, or that which makes us human, namely rational animality. In other words, we posit our cosmic insignificance by unknowingly affirming anthropocentrism on a more fundamental level: if there is ‘intelligent life’ outside Earth, then it must be produced in our own image—even if it is superior to us. The internal contradiction of von Däniken’s image of aliens thus amounts to a situation in which the inference of aliens from the denial of man as the pinnacle of creation implicitly affirms man as the summum of evolution. The importance of human intelligence is thus literally elevated to cosmic proportions. This paradox configures von Däniken’s entire thesis: he uses the astronomical idea that we humans are not special in order to substantiate the thought that there is a superior life-form that created us by visiting us in the past, but his idea of the superior life-form is derived as an extrapolation of a certain image of humanity onto an extraterrestrial hypothetical entity. This humility therefore conceals a deeper affirmation of human exceptionalism.

Ironically, this fake humility can only be remedied by affirming the singularity of human intelligence. This requires us to modify our paradigm of how nature produces life: rather than understanding the natural production as being oriented towards the same, we must now understand it as oriented towards the different. From this perspective, the argument of ‘infinite possibilities’ for life in the universe attains a new sense.

According to the conventional version of the argument, the infinite universe implies that every possible form that life can take has already been individuated, which means that we cannot be ‘alone’. Yet by changing the framework in favor of difference rather than similarity, the traditional argument is destabilized: if life individuates itself in every possible form, then the fact that human intelligence has been individuated on this planet has already exhausted the possibility of human intelligence in the universe, and hence there is no reason why it should individuate itself as human intelligence again elsewhere.[vi] This pattern of thought leads to genuine humility because it affirms not only the singularity of human intelligence but also the singularity of all possible forms that life has taken. Once human intelligence has been affirmed in its singularity, it becomes just as senseless to speak of it in terms of its (in)significance as it would be to speak of the (in)significance of any other unique form of life. According to this pattern of thought, the rose or the bumblebee do not exist on any other planet except for Earth, for the same reason that any extraterrestrial species of flora or fauna that has developed on another planet cannot exist on Earth, as it already exists elsewhere.

The same point can be made even more radically if we abandon the paradigm of identity and difference altogether. In this case, the emergence of lifeforms must be understood not as the individuation of possible identities but rather as the production of singularities. The first paradigm presupposes a virtual collection of possible lifeforms, which nature actualizes throughout the infinite universe. In contrast, the alternative paradigm rejects such a virtual collection of possible individuations of life; instead, each lifeform is produced as an expression of the milieu in which it emerges. In this regard, every lifeform—from Homo sapiens to SARS-CoV-2—can be seen as a singular event resulting from the convergence of physical, biological, chemical, psychological, historical, and all other possible planes of existence. From this perspective, the concept of aliens arises only after a mental operation through which the ontologically singular is transformed into a general concept—an operation that allows the mind to separate rational animality from the milieu in which it emerged and to conceive of it as existing elsewhere.

When it comes to nature as a process of the production of differences, the unique complexity of any organic structure can only be appreciated if we take into consideration that nature uses all of its resources to produce entities which, in their singularity, are equally complex and astonishing as the one that we know as ‘human intelligence’. If we take something seemingly insignificant as an electric eel, we find an organism in which life has individuated itself into a form that uses electricity to attack its prey, defend itself against predators, or communicate with its own species. This animal possesses organs capable of generating both high and low voltage electricity, which allows it not only to shock its prey but also to control its victim’s nervous system and muscles by means of electric impulses. Elsewhere, in the case of bats, we find animals whose perceptual apparatus allows them to construct acoustic images derived from echoes of ultrasonic sounds that they emit. As opposed to the taxonomical prejudice of biology, the ‘essences’ of the bat and the electric eel cannot be reduced to a ‘mere’ anatomic trait. Rather, these animals singularize themselves in terms of what they can do. In the case of the human species, the singularly human form in which nature has individuated itself consists in our ability to effect human science, philosophy, and art, which together constitute culture and civilization. If we are to think of an alien life-form in terms of our own identity, we do no more than generalize our own singular difference: we turn it into an identity that we then multiply by means of projection. Such generalization is, however, no better than what would be gained if a bat were capable of imagining extraterrestrial beings and, in doing so, produced the alien-image that entailed bat-like creatures who perceived through ultrasonically formed acoustic images, albeit far exceeding in superiority the perceptual capacity of ‘terrestrial’ bats that served as the original model of that projection.

Thus, if we are to think of an alien life-form in terms of its proper difference, we must first of all picture to ourselves beings that communicate and think through some natural resource that has not been exhausted by animality on this planet. Perhaps, we can contemplate the possibility of a creature that perceives through radio waves, in which case it is not unimaginable that the human harvesting and technological manipulation of radio signals has unwittingly caused a whole extraterrestrial species to go blind.

 

 

 

Notes:

 

[i] Erich von Däniken, Chariots of the Gods? Unsolved Mysteries of the Past (London: Corgi Books, 1974). Introduction.

[ii] See Ricoeur’s discussion of the hermeneutics of suspicion in The Conflict of Interpretations : Essays in Hermeneutics (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996).

[iii] Helmut Plessner, Anthropologie der Sinne (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2003). I’m drawing mainly from the chapter “Die Einheit der Sinne”.

[iv] von Däniken, Chariots of the Gods?, p 8.

[v] Ibid.

[vi] I follow Gilles Deleuze’s concept of difference in Difference and Repetition (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016).