I’ve been catching up on the first couple of seasons of Through the Wormhole.  We’ve not had this show in the UK, at least I’ve never seen it here and I’m thoroughly enjoying it.  My parents always loved science type shows and I grew up having to watch them and now I love them too.  I can’t imagine anyone not being interested in how the universe works.

I saw one episode earlier this evening about what first contact would be like, and the bottom line was that as all the substances essential to life seem to be uniformly spread throughout the whole universe, any life is likely to be very similar to us.  This pleased me for one important reason; in all of my books, my aliens are very much like us.  As I said before in this post,  I have a real problem with sentient life forms that resemble a puddle of blue gloop or tentacled beings who eat nothing but living human flesh flying sophisticated space ships across the galaxy.  So, my aliens are recognisably humanoid.

The other thing this show brings home to me is how soon it is likely to be that those things I write about in my novels will be commonplace, and that is awesome.  It means that, in a way, I’m predicting the future.  There are so many wonderful and varied theories about how this or that aspect of life, the universe and everything works and it’s so damn exciting.  From a infinite universe, to multiple universes, string theory, mulitiple dimensions and all manner of other mind bogglingly complicated shit, people are really starting to think outside the box and reach out with their minds.  We are living in a time of real exploration, not just physical but mental and it’s amazing.

Personally, I tend to agree with Stephen Hawking on the point of first contact.  He said that any race capable of crossing the vast expanse of space just to come here, aren’t going to go to all that trouble just to say “Hi there y’all, how ya doin?”  If they make all that effort to come here, then the likelihood is that they want something we’ve got and they probably won’t be too keen to take no for an answer.  As Professor Hawking said, in the case of meeting alien life, we’d be wise to keep our heads down.

By the way; a nod to the title of this post.  That is probably the only thing about Star Trek that I hate.  When they say “space, the final frontier,” I get so annoyed because it isn’t the final frontier at all.  There can only be one final frontier and that one is about as final as it gets.  Death, the final frontier.