I recently read a fiction book by Matt Haig, titled, The Humans. The book was a real page-turner, filled with humor, suspense, and philosophical insights.
The novel’s narrator and main character is an alien from the planet Vonnadoria. On this planet, advanced mathematics have enabled the alien species to create a utopian society. When a human mathematician, Andrew Martin, discovers the mathematical proof that would give humans the same technological capabilities as the alien world, our alien narrator is sent to earth to destroy this information as it is believed humans are too greedy and violent to be trusted with such technology. The aliens abduct Andrew Martin and have our nameless narrator assume Martin’s identity.
As the plot progresses, our alien narrator (in the form of Andrew Martin) learns that humans are more than just greedy and violent beings. He starts by viewing our species with contempt for our ugliness, weird customs, and seemingly irrational actions, but by the end of the novel he has grown fond of the human race.
In this blog, I want to share some of the valuable insights we can take from an alien perspective on human life.
It is impossible to exist… yet we do
One of my favorite insights from this novel concerned the infinitesimal odds of our existence. Our alien narrator contemplated the odds of Andrew Martin’s wife’s existence saying:
“I looked at Isobel and saw a miracle… For a start it wasn’t very likely that Isobel’s mother and father would have met. And even if they had met, the chances of their having a baby would have been pretty slim, given the numerous agonies surrounding the human dating process. Her mother would have had about 100,000 eggs ovulating inside of her, and her father would have had five trillion sperm during that same length of time. But even then, even that one in five-hundred-million-million-million chance of existing was a terrible understatement and did the coincidence of a human life nowhere near justice. You see when you looked at a human’s face you had to comprehend the luck that brought that person there. Isobel Martin had a total of 150,000 generations before her, and that only includes the humans. That was 150,000 increasingly unlikely copulations resulting in increasingly unlikely children. That was a one in quadrillion chance multiplied by another quadrillion for every generation or around 20,000 times more than the number of the atoms in the universe but even that was only the start of it, because humans had only been around for three million earth years, certainly a very short time compared to the 3 1/2 billion years since life first appeared on this planet. Therefore, mathematically rounding up things there was no chance at all that Isabel Martin could have existed… And yet there she was, in front of me, and I was quite taken aback by it all.”
I share that long quote with you because I too am quite taken aback by it all.
As humans, we all have an existential moment where we ask what this all means. Perhaps, it would suit us well to disregard these existential worries and focus on the miracle of our existence.
One of my favorite authors, John Gray, captured this sentiment in the last lines of his book, Straw Dogs:
“Other animals do not need a purpose in life. A contradiction to itself, the human animal cannot live without one. Can we not think of the aim of life as simply being to see?”
Weirdness and Insignificance
Throughout the novel, the alien narrator makes humorous observations about our species. The alien notes how weird human noses look, how strange it is that humans make such a big deal about wearing clothes, and how interesting it is that humans often act happy even when they feel sad. As I read this alien perspective on human life, I too started to appreciate the weirdness of it all.
Living with awareness of our weirdness makes life more enjoyable. A sense of wonder returns, and we begin to see humor in how normal we believe things to be. Look around. What weirdness do you see?
Tragedy or Comedy?
Perhaps more importantly, the alien narrator reminded the reader of humans’ insignificance as a species and as individuals. We tend to think of ourselves as an advanced intelligent species. Yet, as this book suggests, it is very well possible that there are exponentially more advanced species existing in the cosmos. Further, the alien narrator pointed out that we are not even the most intelligent species on our planet (“The tonal language in the song of a humpback whale displays more complexity than the entire works of Shakespeare”). We are not as special as we may like to believe.
We tend to go through life oblivious of our insignificance. Constantly, we worry about trivial things like what people will think of our outfit or if we embarrassed ourselves by making that joke that no one laughed at. We live in an infinite cosmos where everything is insignificant and where our existence is as close to impossible as can be. To spend most of our time worrying is to miss the point. Our unimportance relieves us of the pressure to be perfect.
As our alien narrator put it,
“Tragedy is just comedy that hasn’t come to fruition. One day we will laugh at this. We will laugh at everything.”