The Miracle of Knowledge
By Crispin Sartwell


One of the few differences between human beings and bacteria is science: the immense, noble human aspiration to know that no force but beer can quench. The human mind is nature's crowning creation. Like a buzzard in flight it soars into the air, surveying the world from the heights of truth. If only knowledge wasn't power, this impulse to know would be almost admirable.
And yet despite its wonderfulness, science has made some terrifying discoveries. That atoms can be split, for example, might still manage to consume all life in a fiery conflagration of pure science. Many people found it disconcerting when Darwin discovered that human beings were really apes, or when Copernicus displaced us from the center of the universe.
Nevertheless, I had always comforted myself with the idea of human distinctiveness. We are, I hoped, alone in the universe, perhaps selected by God to be uniquely almost smart. Now even this belief seems impossible to sustain in the face of the mighty, irresistible march of knowledge. Astronomers working with a high-precision spectrograph attached to the Anglo-Australian Telescope in New South Wales have announced the discovery of a planetary system very similar to our own. It's a mere 90 light years from earth.
About a hundred solar systems have been discovered in recent years, though none as close as this. It seems likely, in other words, that you can't throw a brick in this universe of ours without hitting an earth-like planet, and thus that there could be people out there everywhere, infesting the galaxies like a plague of German tourists.
I was hoping that when we discovered extra-terrestrial life it would utterly, incomprehensibly different than us. Maybe it would be silicon-based and feed on pure cobalt. Maybe it would have no recognizable sense organs or mode of communication: I was especially hopeful about that.
Instead, it begins to seem likely that there are things more or less like homo sapiens everywhere. And so I look up into the night sky every evening with a sense of utter meaninglessness, realizing that not only is human life empty, but that there's a whole lot of it.
Out there, right now, folks are glued to their sets watching American Idol. Oh, their Clay Aiken might have a tentacle or two springing from his forehead, which I admit would be an improvement. But he's still singing "Bridge Over Troubled Water."
On a thousand planets - or perhaps even on infinite worlds - George Lucas is working on yet another prequel. J.K. Rowling just sat down at the word processor to dash off another thousand pages of Potter. Faith Hill is in rehearsing power ballads. Richard Gephardt is soliciting campaign contributions. Aliens are receiving thousands of e-mails advertising penis enlargement. Gaze skyward, my friends, and despair.
Somewhere out there, Motley Crue is planning a reunion tour. The stock market is rebounding. The invasion of Iraq still seems like a good idea. "People" are lining up for blocks to get Hilary Rodham Clinton's inspirational memoir. Windows runs on 95% of personal computers, and AOL is the biggest ISP. The aliens can't even smoke in bars.
People are sharing their deepest feelings and innermost thoughts. A woman's magazine has just discovered at the same moment the key to weight loss and how to make him think you're the only girl in the room. CBS has announced its fall lineup. Newspapers are buying Michelle Malkin's column instead of mine, so I'm still not famous, rich, and admired. Ann Coulter is rehabilitating Joseph McCarthy. The New York Yankees lead the American League East. Europeans are dressing up to go out dancing.
My notion of extra-terrestrials has of course been derived from the movies: big-eyed, cuddlesome weirdos with glowing fingers or giant bugs that lay parasitical eggs in human beings which hatch from our chests and devour their hosts. Either of these options would be fun and refreshing. The one thing I can't face is the idea that wherever we go and whomever we meet on this infinite quest of human knowledge is going to be basically indistinguishable from Dick Cheney.
And so I derive the obvious conclusion. The inspiring infinite quest for knowledge has got to end before it goes any further. This science thing was a big mistake.