Let me tell you something that keeps me up at night in the best way possible.
Give me just 10 minutes before you reach for that little × in your browser. I want to pull your attention away from the emails, the bills, the text you probably shouldn’t send, and remind you of something. We live inside something so spectacular that it should change the way you think about yourself and the world… and maybe the way you think about aliens, too.
Stay with me. I promise it gets better.
The gold in your jewelry box, the iron running through your blood, the calcium holding your bones upright… every bit of it was forged inside a star that lived and died billions of years before you took your first breath. You are not separate from the sky you stare at. You are that sky, reorganized into a human who can read this sentence.
That, my friend, is chemistry.
Everything alive on Earth is built from the same small collection of elements the universe has been recycling for billions of years. Carbon. Oxygen. Nitrogen. Hydrogen. The ingredients that make you are not rare. They’re cosmic. Which means if life exists somewhere else, there’s every reason to believe it started with the same basic building blocks.
Now let me tell you something that feels completely unrelated. Stay with me…
I am terrified of lightning. Astraphobia, clinically speaking.
Which is a strange kind of irony because lightning is nothing more than electricity unleashed, and electricity is exactly what is running through me right now. Every thought in my head, beat of my heart and movement in my body, begins with an electrical impulse.
I am afraid of a force my own body depends on.
I’ll save that revelation for another day.
For now, just sit with the strangeness of it.
Because it reveals something I think we humans are exceptionally bad at.
We believe whatever our minds hand us, with very little evidence to back it up. Lightning kills about 20 people a year. Heart disease killed 683,491. Somehow the lightning strike terrifies me in a way that greasy foods do not.
Knowing something isn’t the same as experiencing it. Facts tell us what is true. Our brains decide what feels true.
It doesn’t simply record reality; it interprets it; decides what’s dangerous, what’s familiar, what belongs, and what can safely be ignored. Sometimes it’s right. Sometimes it convinces us a lightning strike is more dangerous than the weekly drive-thru run at our favorite fast-food restaurant.
That realization sent me down a completely different rabbit hole. Because if our own brains can miscategorized something as fundamental as electricity and the likelihood of it killing us… what are the chances it’s even remotely equipped to recognize a form of life it’s never encountered before?
Which brings me to the aliens. Hard launch… I know.
We can reason our way to the near certainty that we are not alone in the universe. At a certain point, the numbers start looking at us like, “c’mon now, be so for real”. But what we simply cannot do is picture what an alien looks like, and I mean actually picture them. And I don’t mean the little wide-eyed gray creature Hollywood keeps rebranding every few years.
So… the real question was never do they exist or how do we make contact. If they are out there, and the odds say they are, would our brains even recognize them? Would our brains file them in the right category long enough to get to the part where we try to speak? Or would we see them and file them away as background noise never realizing we’d just overlooked one of the most important discoveries in human history?
The Fermi Paradox: Where are all the aliens? | The Planetary Society
Sistah, grab your coffee. I have questions, caffeine and no supervision.
The Ant Problem
Let’s start small.
Like… really small.
Picture an ant.
Not the cute Pixar kind. The one you accidentally stepped over walking into Target this morning.
Now answer this: how much of that ant’s world do you think you actually understand?
You can watch it carry a crumb that’s somehow three times its body weight. You can see where it’s walking. Maybe if you’re bored enough, you’ll notice it’s following a chemical trail left behind by another ant.
But that’s about where your understanding ends.
You don’t know what information it’s exchanging. Or how it experiences time. You don’t know what it “feels” like to be an ant; assuming feelings even work the same way for something with a brain smaller than a grain of rice.
Its world exists.
You’re just not equipped to experience it.
Life Lessons We Can Learn From Ants – Eartheasy
Now zoom back out.
If an ant can’t comprehend you, what makes you so confident you’d comprehend something far more advanced than yourself?
Not because you’re unintelligent.
But because every living thing is limited by the senses it evolved with.
The Lion Problem
Here’s another one.
A lion should absolutely dominate a human.
Sharper teeth.
Faster.
Stronger.
More athletic in literally every measurable way.
If the animal kingdom held a draft, we’d go embarrassingly late.
And yet…
A lion lives in a preserve because we decided it does.
Not because we’re physically superior.
It’s because we discovered a kind of power the lion cannot perceive.
It doesn’t understand laws.
Or architecture, tranquilizer darts, satellites or international conservation efforts.
To the lion, humans probably look hilariously underqualified to be running the planet.
And honestly that’s fair.
The point is that intelligence doesn’t always announce itself in ways another species can recognize.
Power often looks invisible until it suddenly isn’t.
Maybe We’re Asking the Wrong Question
Whenever people talk about aliens, the question is always the same.
Where are they?
I think that’s the wrong question.
What if they’re here and we’d never know?
Not because they’re hiding behind the moon.
Because we’re looking for something that resembles us.
Two eyes.
Two legs.
A luxury spaceship ready to beam us inside and live as one.
Who decided intelligence had to look like that?
Life on Earth doesn’t even agree on what life should look like.
Octopuses solve puzzles with a nervous system that’s spread throughout their bodies.
Fungi communicate through underground networks that scientists are still trying to understand.
Slime molds can solve mazes… (seriously wtf)
Earth has been reminding us for millions of years that intelligence comes in weird packaging.
Your Brain Is Basically Google
Here’s something I think about all the time.
Your brain is less like a camera and more like Google.
It doesn’t show you everything.
It shows you what it thinks you’re searching for.
Like when you decide you wanted a particular car and suddenly every other person on I-4 apparently owns one?
The cars were always there.
Your attention wasn’t.
The same thing happens everywhere else in life.
Opportunities.
Relationships.
Career pivots.
Ideas.
You don’t suddenly create them.
You finally develop the ability to recognize them.
Which makes me wonder…
If we encountered intelligent life that looked nothing like what we’re searching for, how would we even recognize it if it were right in front of us?
The Silence Isn’t Evidence
There’s a famous question in astronomy called the Fermi Paradox.
The universe is unimaginably old.
There are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy alone.
Many of those stars have planets.
Statistically speaking…
the math suggests somebody else should be out there.
So where is everybody?
Nobody knows.
Maybe space is just really big.
We could be too early.
Maybe we’re late.
Or maybe…
they’ve been speaking a language we’re incapable of hearing.
I don’t know which answer is right.
I just know silence has never been particularly good evidence that nothing exists.
Sometimes silence just means you’re listening on the wrong frequency.
So What Does Any of This Have to Do With You?
Everything.
Manifestation Isn’t Magic; It’s Neuroscience (You’ve Been Doing It Wrong) – The Nerd Bae
I don’t think this is actually an article about aliens.
I think it’s about recognition.
The opportunities you swear don’t exist.
The version of yourself you keep insisting isn’t in there.
The career you think you’re unqualified for.
The people who somehow found success and make it look inevitable.
Maybe none of those things are as far away as they feel.
Maybe you’re just trying to recognize tomorrow with yesterday’s frame of reference.
The mindset girlies were onto something. The receipts just live in the psychology lab, not only the crystal shop.
I just think psychology gives us better vocabulary.
Your brain notices what you repeatedly tell it.
Your confidence changes what actions you take.
Your nervous system determines whether you interpret uncertainty as possibility or danger.
In other words…
Seeing has never been the hard part.
Recognizing is.
Maybe making contact isn’t about distance.
Maybe it is more about perception and recognition.
After all, you’re made from the same atoms as exploding stars.
The electricity that moves your heart is made of the same physical laws that power lightning.
The universe has already proven it’s perfectly comfortable recycling the same ingredients into wildly different forms.
So why do we assume life somewhere else would arrive looking familiar?
Or, while we’re asking uncomfortable questions…
Why do we assume the future version of ourselves will look familiar either?
Maybe the next breakthrough, the next opportunity, the next version of you has been there all along.
Waiting patiently for you to become the kind of person who can finally recognize it.
