If we met those who live out there in deep space ...

Sometimes, I do wonder if atheists like me think about the "big questions" a lot more than do most religious folks!  And even when I am not, well, I run into sentences like this one, which then triggers that thinking:

In a universe where you’re no longer expecting God to provide the order, we are forced to ask: where is the order? Where’s the sense to it all and what are we then a part of?

Or, as we often tend to tell students, it is all about making order out of the chaos out there.

Anyway, that quote is from this interesting interview/essay on the anthropology of searching for aliens. Thanks to my everyday cup of intellectual coffee. Wired interviews Kathryn Denning, who observes:

When did we first start thinking that there might be extraterrestrial life? And my reply is: When did we start thinking that there might not be? The sky has always been very busy, and the default position has always been that it’s populated. That doesn’t mean anything but that ideological substrate has always been there.
Only 200 years ago, we thought there could be people on the moon. Then, we got a good look at the moon and saw, well there’s no Lunarians there. And then there were the Martians — Lowell and all that — and it wasn’t very long ago, less than 100 years ago. As our range of vision keeps on moving outwards, the aliens keep on moving outwards too. And that’s one way you can look at SETI; it’s the logical trajectory of an idea that’s always been around.
And, of course, you can look at it within a religious framework. Our 20th century western culture includes Christianity and beings populating the Heavens. But anthropologically speaking, SETI also could be seen as being a reaction to the collapse of traditional religion.

For all I know, we are being observed by alien anthropologists wondering what the heck we are doing here!

Denning makes wonderful observations throughout the interview.  The one that made me pause and think for a while was this:

NASA renamed the Mars Pathfinder lander the “Carl Sagan Memorial Station.” Any archeologist or anthropologist will tell you that one of the most effective ways of colonizing territory, at least ideologically, is through your dead.

 I hadn't thought about it this way .... really?  Seriously?  Calling it the “Carl Sagan Memorial Station” has such implications?  Are, or we kind of sort of stretching the argument?

I wish we would make contact with aliens within my lifetime.  Will be awesome.  Though, Stephen Hawking thinks not, and Denning has something to say about Hawking's view.  Read the piece to find out what she has to say :)