In August 2022, astrophysicist Avi Loeb—now more famous as an aspiring alien-hunter than as a highly accomplished space scientist—suggested that an interstellar object that exploded above the Pacific Ocean in 2014 may have been not a meteor, as most observers had presumed, but a technological wonder from another planet. In the interests of “interstellar archaeology,” Loeb is currently seeking $1.5M in funding to dredge the ocean floor and hopefully fish up remnants of the shattered object. “If it has any buttons on it,” he has said, “I would love to press them.”
How quaint to believe that alien tech would still make use of buttons. How quaint to believe alien tech—or aliens themselves—would even be physical in their nature at all. Or, indeed, that they would be remotely comprehensible.
In Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s classic 1972 Soviet sci-fi parable Roadside Picnic, unknown extra-terrestrials briefly land on Earth and, afterwards, leave behind all kinds of amazingly advanced technological detritus (rather like an extra-terrestrial version of this scene from Mad Men). The ETs’ physics-defying trash is wonderful to our primitive human eyes, but utterly incomprehensible in its actual mechanics and purpose: our species are like ants encountering the scattered, half-eaten remnants of a roadside picnic, unable to understand what the purpose of empty Pringles tubes and crushed-up cans of Fanta might be. Like the ants, people can find these impossible items, but have no idea how to use them.
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