Braving new worlds: the astronaut in all of us

There are four versions of the world. They exist for everyone and we all move between them.

The first world is my world. The world inside my head, my inner world of thoughts and fears. What I’ve learned about this world is that I can make it a peaceful and verdant place. It doesn’t have to be a MadMax sort of rugged and dystopian Outback. I can make my inner world a pleasant and nurturing place instead of a scary place if I turn my inner critic into a coach.

The second world is the world of others. I have to inhabit someone else’s world to love and understand them. And I have to inhabit their world for someone to feel loved and feel understood. What makes this hard is that everyone else’s world is different, which makes getting there hard. It’s truly like being on a different planet. I feel this acutely with my children, in their worlds of cooking tomato pancakes or caning on pirate ships in our family room.

What I’ve learned about this world is that I will never ever spend too much time here. I will always spend less time than I need to in the worlds of others. If something feels tense, heated, or frustrating, there’s one obvious strategy every single time: walk around with them, in their world. Just be there for a little while before trying anything else. Doing this is never a waste of time.

The third world is the real world. The three dimensions in front of our face where our entire lives happen. Every hug and kiss, every swing of a tennis racket, every birthday cake, every wedding vow. Every misunderstanding and every karaoke night happens here. Every family dinner and scientific discovery - it all happens here. Whether or not we’re mentally there, our life, shared with everyone else, happens in the real world.

I’ve learned two things about this real world. One, things like meditation, prayer, and yoga - that help us to focus in the moment - are so important that it is difficult to overrate them. Anything we can do so help us stay in the moment is priceless.

Two, I’ve learned that it’s important to be honest instead of delusional. We can choose to accept the world as it is, or we can lie to about what’s real. We can see what we want to see, but then our reality is distorted. Distortion, I’ve found, is like drinking: the longer you let it ride, the worse the hangover.

We all travel from world to strange, new, world, and it honestly feels as significant as the spacefarers in movies like Star Trek or Star Wars. We are all astronauts in this way. It’s hard and scary.

And as I’ve penned this post, it just makes me remember how important it is to have grace. Grace for others as they trip up and fumble their way from their world into ours, and grace for ourselves as we try, feebly, to do the same. There’s nothing trivial about this travel from world to world. To be an astronaut in this life is significant and heroic.

But alas, there is still the fourth and final world. It is the world of our dreams - the sacred place. The world of dreams is the hardest to reach, requiring hope, vision, and optimism to find. The portal to the world of dreams is like the 9-and-three-quarters platform - only the indoctrinated can see it and it feels like something from a magical world. Because to dream is to imagine and to imagine is to contemplate something that has never been. To dream about the world that ought to be is to be an explorer in everyday life: dreaming is the act of charting something in our mind’s eye, that no other astronaut has ever seen.

I learned my most important lesson about dreaming from Chief Craig and the leaders I worked for at the Detroit Police Department: we have to talk about our dreams.

For the dream to come true, what I see in my minds eye, you have to see in yours. Without doing this we cannot work toward the same dream.

To be sure, this is uncommonly hard. In our stressed out world, finding the wherewithal to dream on our own is hard. Guiding someone else to meet you there, in that holy plane, is even harder.

So if the universe or our creator blessed us enough to get to the plane of dreams, why would we do anything but dream the biggest, simplest dream we could? To dream big and simple is the most rational choice one can make.

All this inspires me. That we all traverse and inhabit these different worlds inspires. That we all have something in us that allows us to think beyond our own world inspires me. That we are all astronauts, inspires me.

We just have to find the astronaut within, and explore the have the courage to explore these new worlds.

How We Should Treat Aliens

How should I treat a glass of water? Here are a few gut reactions:

1. I should not shatter it senselessly on the floor. Effort and resources went into making the glass. Destroying it for no reason would be wasteful.

2. I should keep it clean and in good working order. That way, there’s no stress because it’s ready for use. There’s no need to inconvenience someone else with even a trivial amount of unnecessary suffering.

3. I should use it in a way that’s helpful. It would be exploitative, in a way, if I took a perfectly good glass and used it as a weapon. If it’s there, I might as well use it to quench thirst, or do something else positive with it. Even glasses are better used for noble purposes than ignoble ones.

4. If I’m thirsty, I should drink the water. After all, it’s here and it won’t be here for ever - life is short.

5. And finally, if someone else is thirsty, I should share what I have. After all, we’re all in this together, trying to survive in a lonely universe.

How should I treat an alien?

The thought experiment of the glass of water is interesting because I don’t know how the glass wants to be treated. I can’t communicate with the glass, so I don’t even know if it has preferences. It is after all, just a glass.

And because the glass doesn’t have any discernible preferences, all my suppositions on how to treat the glass are a reflection of my own intuitions about how other beings should be treated. The question is a revealing one, if one chooses to play along with the thought experiment, because I’m asking a question that’s usually reserved for sentient being about an inanimate object. I can more easily access my true, unbiased, preference because I’m thinking about how to treat a glass of water and not, say, my wife and children.

Helpfully, asking the question revealed some of my deep-seeded moral principles. Each of these intuitions are builds on one of the statements I made above:

1. Don’t be wasteful - energy, and resources are finite.

2. Be kind - other beings feel pain so it’s good not to inflict suffering unnecessarily.

3. Have good intentions - I have the chance to make the world better, using my talents for good purposes. The world can be cruel, so why not make it more tolerable for others.

4. Uncertainty matters - Sooner is better than later because we don’t know how much time we have left. If you have an opportunity, take it. The opportunity cost of time is high, and the future has a risk of not happening the way we want it to.

5. Cooperate if you can - we are all in this universe together, nobody can help us but each other. Life is precious, beautiful, and so rare in this universe, so we should try to keep it going even if it requires sacrifices.

Like a glass of water, if we were to come across an alien species, we would not know what their preferences were. But unlike a glass of water, the aliens might actually have preferences - presumably, the aliens wouldn’t be inanimate objects.

And let’s assume for a minute that we out to respect the moral preferences of aliens, though I acknowledge that whether or not to recognize the moral standing of aliens is a different question, which we may not answer affirmatively.

But let’s say we did.

How we should treat aliens (and how they might treat us)

What this thought experiment helps to reveal is that we have meta-constraints that shape our moral intuitions and in turn, affect our moral preferences.

It matters to our morality that resources and energy are finite. It matters to our morality that we feel mental and physical pain. It matters that the world is an imperfect, sometimes brutal, place. It matters that the future is uncertain. It matters that life is fragile and that for the entirety of our history we’ve never found it anywhere else. Our reality is shaped by these constraints and manifest in how we think about moral questions.

So, like many difficult questions I only have a probabilistic answer to the question of how we should treat aliens: I think it depends. If they face the same sorts of constraints we do, maybe we should treat them as we treat humans. If they face the same constraints we do - like finite resources, uncertainty, and the feeling of physical pain - maybe we could also expect them to treat us with a strangely familiar morality, that even feels human.

But what if? What if the aliens’ face no resource constraints? What if their life spans are nearly infinite? What if their predictive modeling of the future is nearly perfect? What if they know of life existing infinitely across the universe? If some of these “facts” we believe to be universal, are only earthly, it’s quite possible that the aliens’ moral framework is, pun intended, quite alien to our own.

Maybe we’ll encounter aliens 10,000 years or more from now, and maybe it’ll be next week. Who knows. I hope if you are a human from the far out future, relative to my existence in the 21st Century, I hope you find this primitive thought experiment helpful as you prepare to make first contact. More than anything, I’m trying to offer an approach to even contemplate the question of alien morality: one tack we can take is to look at the meta-constraints that affect us at the species and planetary level, and then see how the aliens’ constraints compare.

But for all us living now, in the year of our lord, two thousand twenty two, I think there’s still a takeaway. Thinking about how we should treat glasses of water and aliens provides a window into our own sense of right and wrong. Maybe we can use these same discerned principles to better understand other cultures and other periods of history. Do other cultures have different levels of scarcity or uncertainty, for example? Maybe that affects their culture’s moral attitudes, and we can use that insight to get along better.

If we’re lucky, doing this sort of comparative moral analysis will make the people and species we share this planet with feel a little less, well, alien, while we figure out who else is out there in the universe.