I Wonder Whether We Are the Only Life in the Universe

Sometimes, this question leads me to thinking about
· Movies about aliens
· Little green men with probes and lasers
· Sci fi shows like Firefly (my all time favorite tv series, cancelled too soon, alas)
· Werewolves
· Science fiction novels by Robert Heinlein

. . . and my imagination runs wild with the wacky possibilities. I want to write stories and novels and children’s songs, and wish I could draw or paint so I could show you all the fantastic scenes that play through my mind.

Sometimes, this question leads me to thinking about
· Carbon-based life forms, and how we are all guilty of non-carbon-life discrimination (Who says granite isn’t alive? Why, creatures not made of granite, that’s who)
· The mind-blowing pictures from the Mars Rover
· Solar system models from elementary school
· Space shuttle missions and how nowadays they get no fanfare at all (NASA totally needs a new publicist)
· How unfathomably long a light year actually is

. . . and an old childhood desire to be an astronaut is rekindled, and some love of science which is buried deep (I say deeeeeep) in my soul is touched, and flickers awake for a moment.

Sometimes, this question leads me to thinking about
· God
· Angels
· Ghosts
· Unbelievable coincidence
· Death, and where we go when it happens
· Microcosms and macrocosms and just ‘cosms in general, and how everything is just like everything else, and nothing like anything else

. . . and I realize how lonely I really am right this second, how lonely we all are, and how small, and how large. How ignorant and how hopeful. How alive and unreal and inexplicable we are. I feel breathless terror at the abyss of universe that we are all perched on the edge of, and a little thrill to wonder what it would be like to suddenly fall off the earth, up into the sky, and float into space, and I wonder how long it would be before my body was annihilated and how much I would see before that happened. It would almost be worth it.

I feel like a pinky toe dipped into a fathomless, still, dark underground lake. Of and not of. Touched. Unseeing, unknowing, but with a vague sense of being enveloped by some great mysterious thing.

I wonder, indeed.

Peace and freaked out interstellar love to all you carbon-based life forms - G