Days and nights are filled with biased and misleading information in pursuit of gaining political mileage. Simply put, propaganda rules. This includes spreading information, arguments, half-truths, full lies, and rumours, to influence public opinion. Fiction is its active component, and yet we don’t consider it as such, preferring to fall for it or fight it, depending on who is floating the malicious stuff — a political party or a faction that one favours, or opposes.
Fiction is born out of imagination. That it easily caters to propaganda is not the fault of fiction, but that of devious — albeit imaginative — minds using it to float propaganda. Had we been alert to what is fiction and what is not, probably we would have been more adept at sniffing it out. Since we are not, we let it provide us some form of excitement in life, loving it if it serves our ideology or opinion, hating it if it doesn’t.
Whichever side wins, hate spreads. Hate wins.
Let’s cut to a more refreshing form of fiction: Science fiction. Refreshing, because it provides different scenarios, different possibilities, very different narratives, completely diverting our minds on routes away from the mundane.
That’s why science fiction is held in awe, triggering our imaginations beyond set limits. Especially popular in this genre of fiction is “extraterrestrial life”, and works dealing with the billion-dollar question: “Does extraterrestrial life exist?”
The awe is such that a close look at the efforts of all the space-faring countries — including India — ultimately aim at planetary exploration missions, which in turn (and very importantly) include getting that one question answered: “Does extraterrestrial life exist?”
Ray Douglas Bradbury, an eminent American author and screenwriter who worked on a variety of genres like science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery and realistic fiction, described science fiction this way: “(It) is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again....It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.”
How right Bradbury was has been proved in 2009 by India’s Chandrayaan-1 mission in relation to a then-fictional observation by Isaac Asimov, considered among the top three science fiction writers alongside Arthur C Clarke and Robert A Heinlein. In his 1979 book Extraterrestrial Civilizations, Asimov says: “…might there not be water present in minor quantities in small pools or bogs in the shadow of crater walls, in underground rivers and seepages, or even just in loose chemical combination with the molecules making up the Moon’s solid surface?”
Three decades after Asimov’s prediction based on imagination, Chandrayaan-1’s Moon Impact Probe slammed into the lunar surface to raise a plume of lunar dust. Payloads on the Moon-orbiting Chandrayaan-1 went active to detect water molecules in the lunar dust plume — a breakthrough discovery of the existence of water molecules on Moon. An imagined fiction became a fact.
The same Asimov also made another imaginative prediction about how extraterrestrial beings could be: “Why can’t life with chemical and physical properties completely different from terrestrial life nevertheless develop and evolve intelligence? Why can’t there be a very slow, solid life form (too slow, perhaps, to be recognized as life by us) living on the Moon, or for that matter, here on Earth? Why not a very rapid and evanescent gaseous life form, literally exploding with thought and experiencing lifetimes in split seconds, existing on the Sun, for instance.” Future technological capabilities will tell whether they do exist in those forms.
But a crucial aim of space exploration (they never admit this!) is to scout for alternative planets for the sustenance of humankind if Earth becomes uninhabitable — a likely scenario from our current position. While at it, one question may pop up in the mind: Why not give as much importance to finding love and harmony here and now on Earth as much as to finding extraterrestrial life forms in whatever shapes sizes and forms, or to finding alternative planets as abodes for Homo Sapiens — the same species which is extremely proficient in finding means to justify hate using “fictional truths” to spread propaganda.
Spreading love and harmony sincerely and truthfully — among humans and with nature and the ecosystems — may well eliminate the need for escaping Earth to find other planets as abodes in the far future. But we need to act now, and while doing so, also need to remember another of Asimov’s observations: “The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than (human) society gathers wisdom!”