Aliens
The joke goes; “We know there’s intelligent life out there because it hasn’t contacted us yet”.
Aliens don’t interest me in the conventional sense - the certainty of little green men in flying saucers representing a civilisation waiting to explain stuff to us - however, these images are speculation on the variants we might encounter were they to connect with us, and there is pondering to be done.
Although biology may not be their defining characteristic, my figures are biological beings. Their bodies will be neither wholly natural nor wholly artificial as they will have modified themselves repeatedly, generation after generation, until evolution and engineering are indistinguishable. My portraits are the most current versions of these beings.
Follow this line of thought and my aliens may not be alien to us at all.
Humanity is already on the same path, wouldn’t you say? We repair failing organs and genes. We outsource memory to machines whilst increasingly inhabiting information-based rather than physical worlds. The difference is only one of degree. My visitors will have travelled much further down that road and I imagine them presenting themselves to us not as conquerors but as evidence that advanced intelligence is not humanity’s sole purview, and, that it is always advancing.
These beings will have discovered that inherited characteristics are not fixed. Intelligence, memory, sensory systems, lifespan, physical appearance, emotional architecture—even consciousness—become optional parts of the design process. The organism would still have origins in biology, but biology may not be the only thing determining form. Evolution has imbued some forms of life with the capability to direct their own evolution.
My green men will have a physical logic, but not one that completely aligns with our expectations.
My visitors immediate arrival will shake us. Their physical appearance will offer few initial reassurances of intent; their forms having been shaped by purposes we can’t easily infer and in environments we cannot know.
Yet the unease reveals more about us than them. Humans prefer what can be classified. We prefer clear boundaries between the artificial and the natural, and, the visitors may identify as neither of these preferences. It is my bet they’ll exist in an entirely new classification.
Will they already possess an image of the human form? Will they instinctively recognise us, in part or otherwise?
I feel these images are therefore more about us than them, and, how changes no longer happen to a species over time; they’re the result of changes the species chooses to make to itself.
The images are imaginations of a future inhabited by beings who are both architect and material, where Darwinian evolution has given way to deliberate evolution.
And that is a radical thought. That change has become something a species can do to itself. If so, humans might just become interesting enough to deserve a call from out there.