In the 1968 epic, 2001: A Space Odyssey, a mysterious monolith arrives on the African savannah in the dim dawn of prehistory, causing extreme agitation among the local hominids.
These ancient pre-humans, it is implied, have spent the past million years shrieking at each other, avoiding leopards, and doing extreme cardio by performing burpees while wearing rubber prosthetics.
But everything changes when the monolith arrives. Almost overnight the hominids evolve, mastering the skill that has made us the dominant species on the planet: knocking things on the head with clubs.
Millions of years later, in 2001, scientists find another monolith, this one buried on the moon. This one, it turns out, has been placed there as a sort of Grade 7 exam to test whether the Grade R class of prehistory is finally ready to take its next step into the cosmos.
This week, when sheep-counting rangers found a large metal “monolith” in the Utah desert, it was inevitable that 2001 would resurface in our collective unconscious, with many people suggesting, with varying degrees of seriousness, that it had been left here by aliens.
When I first saw the enormous slab, I assumed it was a battery from a Nokia cellphone that had been dropped in the desert after its weight tore a hole in the fuselage of a business jet heading to Salt Lake City in 1997.
It was a silly response, of course, but it was also subtly reassuring. I think it’s a good thing that, even after 2020, even after all these years of corrupt, squalid leadership and economic retreat, our fantasies still head straight for the Milky Way and the great What Ifs of the universe.
I must confess that my own thoughts were more banal. When I first saw the enormous slab, I assumed it was a battery from a Nokia cellphone that had been dropped in the desert after its weight tore a hole in the fuselage of a business jet heading to Salt Lake City in 1997.
But I much prefer the idea that the object (which I grudgingly concede is almost certainly a piece of installation art) has been left here for us by a benevolent alien species waiting for us to evolve.
I like that idea, because it means that somewhere, billions of kilometres away, there’s a civilisation which expends immense amounts of energy and/or time travelling to distant places to hide secret messages, which can’t be understood, in places where almost no life exists that might be able to decipher said messages.
In short, which behaves as sensibly and efficiently as our own civilisation.
Yes, the Utah monolith lets me imagine that somewhere out there, in the cold, unsympathetic vastness of space, there are beings just as brave and splendid and idealistic and idiotically wasteful and downright moronic as we are, and that truly, we are not alone ...
