Doing Theology in A Cosmic Mode

A Guide for the Perplexed

Last week, I published a review of astrophysicist Adam Frank’s The Little Book of Aliens. In a nutshell: it is statistically all but impossible that we are alone in the universe; it is very likely that our capacity to develop a global civilization is matched by other species that have managed the same; it is plausible, though we don’t yet understand exactly how it could be done, that some of those civilizations manage interstellar travel in a way that allows for the preservation of a continuous culture across multiple worlds and systems. On the Kardashev Scale, modified forms of which astrophysicists still generally use, a Type I Civilization would be able to harvest the available energy of its home planet; a Type II Civilization, the available energy of its home star; a Type III Civilization, the available energy of its home galaxy. At that stage, we are dealing with beings who would be utterly undistinguishable from gods, lower-case g. Perhaps there’s a hierarchy of cosmic powers where the transition from an enfleshed, or otherwise hard, materially embodied, species to a “spiritually” or energetically embodied one is so slight as to be unnoticeable.

We are not even at Type I: Carl Sagan measured us as being somewhere at a .7. For as far as we’ve come, we remain infants, beginning to stand and grasp the bars of our cradle, and look to the stars shining through our bedroom window.