science fiction and the search for meaning

I’ve been a science fiction fan, intermittently, for many years. Recently I’ve been wondering why the genre attracts me, and others. I’ve been pondering the idea that it’s a substitute for religion.

Back in the days when religion was alive and thriving people would look up at the night sky and see it as evidence of God’s benevolence. God had put the stars up there, attached to some kind of celestial sphere, for a purpose. He had put the Moon and the Sun up there for a purpose. It was all good.

By the beginning of the 20th century we were starting to comprehend the vastness of the universe. It was not comforting. It was immense but essentially meaningless. When people looked at the night sky they were looking into the void. Science fiction provided a much more comforting answer. The universe was teeming with life. Those stars were suns, almost certainly with planetary systems, and they were home to countless fascinating and advanced civilisations. Some might be hostile but that was OK, we’d either overcome them or turn them into friends. After all, even the Klingons became our allies. And many of those alien civilisations would be wise and benevolent and they’d offer us exciting new technologies and knowledge.

And we would expand into the galaxy ourselves. We’d create interstellar empires (but good empires not wicked colonial empires) or interstellar federations. We would become almost god-like with our vast scientific knowledge and technological miracles. It was all good. The universe had meaning after all. The stars were our destiny.

Of course it was not just science fiction writers but also the more speculative scientists doing this, but those two groups overlap to some extent.

Then came the actual space age. When the Soviet Union put a man in space in 1961 it seemed like a real triumph for humanity. Then he Americans put men on the Moon, Another triumph, and more would surely follow. Mars would be next. And then the stars. Nothing could stop us. We would surpass God.

But the Moon turned out to be a dead rock and unmanned spacecraft sent to Mars indicated that Mars was a dead rock as well. And we didn’t go to Mars.

And lurking in the background was the grim reality of the speed of light as an absolute limit. Science fiction writers knew about this but they ignored it. Some way would be found to get around it.

But we probably won’t find a way to get around it. And so far we’ve found zero evidence that the universe is teeming with life. In fact we’ve found zero evidence that there is any intelligent life in the universe at all apart from ourselves. Of course it is possible that there are lots of advanced alien civilisations out there but once you start giving serious thought to the distances involved (distances in space and time) and the almost certain impossibility of faster-than-light travel, and once you really think through the ramifications of that, it becomes evident that even if alien civilisations exist it is very very unlikely we will ever be able to contact them.

We convinced ourselves that we could live without God, but can we live without aliens as well? Can we deal with being effectively all alone in the universe?