Excessive Packaging

There was a premiere of a new television show this last Tuesday on the WB called "Supernatural". Basically, two brothers go ghost hunting. I imagine it is sort of an X Files type show but doesn't have nearly the same production value. I'm guessing, a much smaller budget. I'll watch it anyway- I just can't help myself.

Tonight on CBS there is a premiere of a new show called "Threshold". Threshold is about a team of experts who are assembled, when a crashed alien craft is discovered, to decipher the intention of the craft, the fate of the ship's crew and begin preparations for the possibility of a crisis situation--an alien invasion.

I love this type of stuff. I'm all over anything having to do with the supernatural, ghosts, the unexplained, space travel and aliens. Tiya jokes that she is traumatized from me making her watch the X Files as a little kid. LOL! She might be right. :)

I had a neighbor once who was a stout Christian. I'm not sure what denomination but they home schooled their children and were very involved in their church. He thought it was so great that I worked on a couple of the Star Trek movies. He really liked Science Fiction but did not entertain the idea of life else where in the universe. As far as he believed, we were all that God created and that if God had created more he would have stated so in the Bible.
One evening while debating this idea with him I asked, using an analogy, "would you say that 'we' (meaning, all that God created on earth within the universe) are no more than a grain of sand in a swimming pool?"
He quickly retorted, "No, no, no... We are more like a grain of sand in the ocean."
"Wow!" I said, "doesn't that seem like excessive packaging?"
He laughed, and said, "you know, I have never heard it put that way before."

I like to think that we are not alone in all of this and that somewhere out there, millions of light years away, on other planets there are beings that are wondering if they too are all alone. As soon as you say aliens people conjure up the typical "Hollywood" definition of alien, as advanced species that have traveled somehow through space to visit our planet. What if they have never really visited us or that they are as bound to their world as we are to ours. I would like to think that even if they haven't visited us that they may still be out there, perhaps waiting for us to visit them.

Is it not ego-centric of us to believe that we are the only life forms in the universe? To me it is synonymous with believing that the world was flat or that the earth was the center of the universe and that everything revolved around us. We were once wrong. Is it possible that we could still be wrong in the great scheme of things? After all isn't it like saying, "It isn't until we become adults that we realize we were once children." My own father once told me while we were talking about life on other planets, "I'm more of a show me kind of guy. Show it to me and I will believe it." To be honest, my heart sank a little. I guess I never expected a comment like that from my father. I have never really understood a black and white mentality. As I have grown older I have realized how difficult it is for people to think beyond their boundaries.