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Who else is watching?

June 30, 2021   ·   0 Comments

By Constance Scrafield

Ok. So, we all know that Santa is watching us to ascertain whether we’re bad or good, I guess all year long, because that is what that really creepy song seems to indicate. We get it.

Also, I guess the divinities are watching because they have particularly advantageous seats from which to see our whole drama/comedy. From ancient times, they have been portrayed as mystic, mischievous beings, doling out favours, punishment and even love.

There is a varied single deity, a varied father image, from punitive to loving, like any father, I suppose, but bigger. Still, watching our every move, conferring with St. Peter about individual chances of entry into Heaven…

For many decades, we have been watched. Computers listen to our telephone calls to red-flag certain keys words and Edward Snowdon’s book, Permanent Record, paints a terrifying picture of our present day. We are spied on every minute and have embraced this completely in a way that is quite contrary to what science fiction writers imaged all through the 19th and 20th Centuries.

They pretty well, uniformly and with reasonable accuracy wrote in dire tones, this future of government and corporate spying on the common people to manipulate and control the masses. As it is today.

However, with more faith in humanity than humanity deserves, they consistently penned stories of rebellion against the watchfulness and control; rebellions of resistance and, sometimes with wild optimism, the overthrow of and freedom from the shackles.

Imagine how wrong those authors all were – not only is there no struggle on humanity’s part to resist the oversight of our every moment but, conversely, we buy into it with our own participation – we even purchase smart machinery to eavesdrop on our private conversations, in our own homes, and pass them along to parties interested in us.

Primarily, this intense interest in the minutiae of our lives is less a political thing and much more a commercial thing, maybe voting too – well, many aspects of our lives – but it is mainly about how we spend our money, with the “one percent” wanting that money to go their way, Jeff Bezos and all that.

When Facebook first started getting a serious grip on society, I was really puzzled by the tiny personal details people showed about their lives and their children’s lives. I have been concerned about the rights of children, in the issue of having their lives exposed, sometimes in great detail, by their parents and guardians and without their permission.

Surely, in the futures of many adults will come the embarrassment and, even, outrage of what was shared with the whole wide world about them, in their early years. This is like the jokes about parents pulling out old baby pictures of their daughters or sons to show the boy/girl friend, newly brought home to meet the family. Only way worse.

So. In the news recently and on the CBC program As It Happens, is the story that Astronomers have discovered 70 planets within complicated visual range, whose possible populations could readily spy on us, on our every move, here on earth.

I was so glad to hear this, I can tell you and, as luck would have it, if we pay good attention to the timing of these moments of revelation about other societies on other planets, we can check them out too, in a very real way. Fantastic.

First and foremost, the notion dismisses, in a single sentence, the folly of even wondering if there is life on other planets. Not only does this proposition presume without hesitation that there is but can point to some 70 planets where those other civilizations probably reside! 

At last, what must be the case is finally presented, casually but earnestly, as potential peeping-toms on the privacy of us earthlings! Wonderful and I am completely a believer. The idea that earth is the sole planet in an unending universe that bears sentient beings is so crazy, it goes along well with theories that the earth is flat and only 6,000 years old.

Sadly, the spy-time is short, quite specific and because of how damn big space is, those moments are spaced out over years. Well, the speed of light dawdles at a mere (approximately) 300,000 metres per second, so, when objects are so far away, it takes ages to see them again and to truly understand their nature. So, we have to catch them as they are in an orbit that creates an eclipse of their own sun.

See? There are plenty of stars, as we see them, that are good to go as suns and have appropriate orbs circling them, suitable for and very likely supporting life on them and if life here can be intelligent – example: dolphins, elephants, octopus and more, then it is reasonable to assume there is intelligent life there too. Not reasonable to doubt it.

And they can be checking us out. Maybe we should clean up our acts.

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