E.T., phone Earth!

By Nancy Black

I think it’s time for a little alien shake up here on Earth. We humans are all way too set in our ways. We go about our day-to-day lives expecting everything to be status quo. Sure, as people, we hit bumps along the way, but we are a resilient species. We bounce back.

I think as humans, though, we’ve gotten a little stuck up. We think we are the be-all-end-all of the universe. We are not.

Google has a fascinating video they created that starts with a woman lying on the grounds of the Google headquarters courtyard. The “camera” begins to slowly zoom out above her.

The viewer goes from seeing the woman close up, to slightly further away up in the sky, to a satellite view from earth’s atmosphere, and then on and on into and past the Milky Way. Then the camera zooms back down to the lady, past her eye, into her brain, then into her nerves, then into the nucleus of her atoms.

It truly is an amazing video. It illustrates in a very real way just how amazing our universe, and our bodies, are.

When Elon Musk and his team of think-outside-the-box scientists launched their rocket, Falcon Heavy, this week, I got goose bumps. And when I saw Musk’s old cherry-red Tesla sports car dispatched into a trajectory past Mars toward the asteroid belt, with its space-suited mannequin driver listening to David Bowie on the radio, I laughed out loud. Who says you can’t explore outer space with a sense of humor? Not Elon Musk, for sure.

I’d love to see the reaction from the alien beings who discover that vehicle floating around. I wonder what kind of sense of humor “they” have. I hope “they” have a sense of humor. I hope “they” exist. I hope “they” are like Steven Spielberg’s “E.T.” and not Ridley Scott’s “Alien.” But, whatever “they” turn out to be, I hope to see them soon — driving that red Tesla back into Earth’s atmosphere.