Something Special Part Duex Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Alien

Again…when I say Alien here, I don’t mean our favorite 8-foot creature of some kind with acid for blood that arrived on Ripley’s spaceship, kills on sight, and is generally unpleasant. I refer back to my previous thread….“It’s the concept of that which lies outside human conception, that which is entirely foreign to human thinking, comprehension or configuration….what is Alien to us.”….and why this all fascinates us…why science fiction continually draws us back to the concept of extraterrestrial alien life and the inevitable paradox of imagining and reckoning what is impossible to imagine. We’re right back to Dallas’ thought from Alan Dean Foster’s novelization, “Basically, he hadn’t expected the alien to be so completely alien.”….should we ever meet true alien life, it ought to be completely alien, completely impossible to conceive, impossible to understand, and by our very nature, sadly, impossible to trust, thus impossible to be anything but absolutely terrifying. Most people would say the idea of alien life does not frighten or disturb them on any level….it’s the classic cliché, “I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”….and I always find that rather interesting. How can any of us claim to know how we feel about what is impossible to conceive? If you can’t accurately picture the bridge, how can you ever hope to cross it? That’s the paradox. Sure, our brightest writers conceive of aliens, we imagine what they’ll look like, what their modus operandi could possibly be….but in truth, there exists a natural gap in even what the most talented creative minds string together and the actuality of what we would experience. Coping with that natural gap, we keep poking at…what lies between the furthest reaches of the human imagination and whatever reality may or may not exist out there in the immense expanse of space…its inevitable tangle of unfathomable emotions and instinctive reactions….that’s where all the fun is, why writer after writer comes back to the concept; why there seems to be such an endless variety of opinion and concept; why people like us anticipate with such vigor and passion, the kind of movie, the kind of story ‘Prometheus’ can potentially be. Sure…part of of me is disturbed by the possibility of what may actually be out there….but that’s why I can’t look away and, I suspect, why none of you can either.