We all know that when beings from an alien world track us down, they will be far superior to us. They will be better designed and technologically advanced beyond measure. They will be amused by our communications system, which has wrapped our planet in the virtual barbed wire of satellites and wires strung across the land and under the sea.

They will find our personal habits peculiar and our wars – most driven by debates over supernatural beings which have never been seen – appalling. They might muster some measure of sympathy for the sloppy way in which the creatures of Earth are put together. We need to sleep a third of our lives. We have to stop and refuel three times a day and then discharge the waste from crude digestive systems three times a day.

That’s a lot of time spent sleeping, eating, peeing and pooping. Is it so surprising we have not yet found a way to conquer light years of distance?

I’m not saying that a purple creature from the planet Peetoonius came to visit me in the night and shared all that he knows. But I have a few edumucated guesses on why extraterrestrial beings from across the universe will be much more efficiently put together. Here are a few which will appear in a novel or two I plan to write once I stop sleeping ten hours a day and waking only to eat and take a leak.

• Lack of combativeness: it’s not that we’re bad people who do battle just because we’re cranky. From the very start, inhabitants of Earth have had to fight over things like food and living space. Hunting has always been the way of survival. Out there in a better part of the universe, it might not be so. The alien creatures don’t have to stalk their co-inhabitants, kill and then eat them. They are fueled by that which bombards their planet, elements falling from the parent star, perhaps. This might be similar to photosynthesis. Our friendly ETs are not forced to compete for food and thus, have not developed a combative nature. Also, they don’t have to hit the can every half hour: waste from their fueling system will be released naturally and without the conscious effort of grunting over a floor-seated receptacle. Again, this might be similar to plants releasing waste in the form of oxygen during the photosynthetic process.

• Better sex: Man and most of the creatures of our planet are designed to peak early. We conquer while we are young and strong, pass along our seed and then die. All this in a cosmically puny period of roughly 70 years. Not so with our space friends. They might live a thousand years or so individually, spending that time in an effort to advance their race. Only at the end of their lifespan will they reproduce in order to provide offspring to take their place. That’s a thousand year life spent mastering the laws of the universe and putting it to use for the good of the species.

• Better sleep: In fact, no sleep. Here on the blue planet, we hit the sack for eight hours at a time, closing ourselves off from the world and laying in the dark. Horribly inefficient. For a full third of our time alive, we put our intellect to bed. Not so on Peetoonius. There, overachieving creatures will replace sleep with simple conservation of energy, entering into period of low energy while continuing to function throughout their days. Man has created machines that function this way but will never be able to do it themselves.

• Better politics: Competition here on Earth may be great for business and the economy, but it does hinders the free exchange of ideas. Our otherworld friends will experience no such hindrance. All inhabitants of that world will be striving toward the same ends with no divisions in the form of countries, political parties or warring ideologies. Again, it is not that they are morally superior beings but that they evolved this way because of a more peace-inspiring system of fueling.

I don’t need to spell out how all of these advantages will contribute to the technological know-how of these strangers from another place. They will have learned to master the laws of physics so that travel across vast space does not require a need for speed. They are creating black holes as a matter of course and using them to weave through the fabric of space rather than trying to whiz across it. They have known for millions of years what dark matter is comprised of and are using it in myriad ways. They know that gravity is pathetically weak because it is leaking into unseen dimensions and they are using those dimensions as virtual Wal-Marts, getting things there that we will not know of for another five million years, assuming we are still around then.

Somewhere out there in the giant stretch of space are beings with all these attributes and thousands more that I cannot conjure with my inadequate human brain. Here on earth, we are around to write or read windy blogs like this one because of a long and improbable series of flukes that left our spot in the galaxy ripe for life. But our existence is far, far from perfect. As we speak, I feel the need to go out for food because my energy has dropped appreciably. Soon after that time sucking exercise, I will need to sleep. All of that time spent catering to the many demands of the human body while the Peetoonians just keep on working.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 30th, 2009 at 11:12 am and is filed under Etc.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.