The Truth is Out There, Metaphorically by Emily

The Truth is Out There, Metaphorically by Emily - August 2017 Scholarship Essay

The first day of class I'll turn off all the lights and put up a projector to the ceiling. It will show slowly show the size of the universe, scaling first to a human, then a population, then a planet and so on and so forth. After the students realize their insignificance in the face of the all that exists, I will ask them their thoughts, how they feel about their place in this world. Every once in a while, I’ll share a statistic like 100 billion habitable planets in the Milky Way, or 93 billion light years as the length of the universe. I want every student to first start out with incomprehensible numbers, so that they grow in my class into specific inferences. The very last thing I will ask at the end of the first lecture is, “Does life exist somewhere else?”.
The rest of the semester will be answering that very question, but also much more. It will ask why the human race is so adamant in finding life somewhere else, when there are more animal species found every day down on Earth. Why many people feel so small, or so large, when they sit back and look at the stars. How we would be able to handle possibly another intelligent species, when we cannot even avoid discrimination against our own. The class is more philosophical and metaphysical rather than scientific, because so many people are numbed by the statistics and the numbers that they don’t really understand why it matters.
There would be discussion of why we haven’t met intelligent life yet, or what would we do if we will in the future. What it would look like, how it would communicate, what their reaction be to seeing humans. All this, in order to explore what nobody else before has felt, empathy to an intelligent race from a world unlike our own.
I want all this in order to grow the student’s understanding of their role in this world. I want this to help those who may be overwhelmed with their blimp of a life flashing just momentarily in the scale of the universe. I want to share with the mentally ill student who repeats in their head 24/7, “You are worthless”, that the very elements that make up the brain telling you those words are the same ones that were formed in the hearts of stars.
I want all this because I have faced the same exact questions, the same exact fears, and the same exact words. But exploring the universe and discussing the possibility of life somewhere has reassured me that this life has not been lived in vain, and that the lives of possible aliens hasn’t been either. We are all stuck in this universe with no option but to live. I hope other students will realize this as well.

And I also want to talk about aliens, so the class can watch X-Files every Friday.