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The Gods are our Imaginary Friends
We refuse to feel alone in the universe
What are gods, assuming they don’t exist? They have many social functions. They’re tools for subjugating gullible hordes of uncritical thinkers; they’re mirrors reflecting our vanity or perhaps they’re harbingers of what we expect to evolve into as a result of technological progress; and they’re fictions that inure us to the inevitability of our bodily demise. One aspect of the gods, though, that should be better understood becomes apparent when we reflect on two unsettling facts.
Invisible Friends and Cosmic Aloneness
The first is that the probability is extremely low that any human will encounter intelligent extraterrestrial life, and that’s so even if the universe is teeming with life beyond the solar system. This is because the universe is so mind-bogglingly vast that the time needed to travel between galaxies or stars would make even a light-speed journey unfeasible.
Moreover, by the time aliens could travel here or we could reach them, both their civilization and ours would likely have become extinct. Just as creatures throughout the universe would be separated in space, they would also be divided by time: the chance that two species originating from different stars would be near enough that they could reach each…
