The government responded that it had no proof of alien life. That would be fine if there weren’t facts that do not play well together.

First, no military personnel that deals with secret agendas can blow any whistle that was not manufactured by a government agency. What is the point of this? They were acting on government instructions, saying the opposite of what the government tells us.

What was this charade of contradicting messages about?

Flooding the zone

Flooding the zone is a strategy that releases contradictory messages, mixes facts with fictional details so in that the end nobody knows what is true and what is not. This means that either the government has information on aliens and wants to hide it or it has no information on aliens und wants to hide that, too - potentially using it as a smokescreen for something else, for example advanced weapons testing.

It would be highly amusing if the government had used a science fiction style playbook to cover up military technology after decades of denying the existence of UFOs (renaming them as UAPs is another flood point).

If the government knew, should it drop all contradicting messages and tell the truth? Or would truth be something that mankind could not stomach at this time?

Imagine the president of the United States stepped in front of a bouquet of microphones:

“We have proof of alien intelligences visiting Earth. We also have some of their craft and are reengineering it. This is a great business opportunity. Be reasonable, people.”

And would they be?

Would they be reasonable?

There are two primary ways this could play out.

1: Mankind at its best

A spark illuminates the human night. It is the realization that there is an infinite universe out there. It used the be the fabric of stories. Now it has become reality.

We are standing at the threshold of the interstellar era of mankind.

It is a new era of enlightenment.

The commercial media landscape dries up overnight. Interest in knowledge, thought, science, wisdom, philosophy, literature and the arts expands exponentially. Suddenly humanity wants to become the best version of itself.

Instead of looking at themselves in self-centered isolation, human beings raise their eyes and take in the grand panorama of the universe. Political divides disappear like lines of chalk on a sidewalk in a spring rain. Gambling joints remain empty. Pornography sites have no visitors. Criminals want to turn their lives around and turn towards the light.

The liars and ideologues, manipulators and frauds, marauders and mercenaries, all those pied pipers that have led humanity into the darkness for so long fall into oblivion as if the had never existed. Mankind rids itself decisively of these elements of doom as a civilization does that wants to rise.

Dystopian fantasies fade like nightmares. The rising morning sun of a new future burns them to ashes.

This is a monolith moment in human history:

In the novel “2001: a Space Odyssey” by Arthur C. Clarke, turned into a classic movie by Stanley Kubrick an alien monolith appears among ape men and by its supreme energy raises them to become space men who find a second monolith on the moon. It inspires an interplanetary pilgrimage to Jupiter where astronaut David Bowman finds a third monolith and the understanding of existence.

The aliens are impressed by the sudden turn of mankind from consumer culture to an interstellar race and alter the reserved behavior they have held during hundreds of years of watching us. They acknowledge that man is ready to step out into space.

This is how the interstellar era of mankind begins.

2: Mankind at its worst

Can you see the crowds racing towards the alien landing sites guided by alien spotter apps? Look how they blindly run into the high energy drive fields of the ships. Those surviving the attempt on a historic selfie with aliens tell stories of alien attacks copying the tropes of SciFi horror TV shows.

Platform algorithms of doom make these invasion reports go to the top while the boring voices - those who offer truth and thought - get pushed down to the bottom where nobody can see them. AI slop enhances the lies. Lies feed upon lies and this tornado of fake grinds up every bit of truth. Nobody knows what is true any more. Nobody can tell what really happened and doesn’t think one should know. Truth is irrelevant. What gets the most clicks, likes and follows is what counts.

Human virtues and truth fall like domino tiles one after the other. And when the last tile will have fallen, will humanity still stand?

Digital hate mobs turn into lynch mobs and pull the reasonable voices out of their houses, decrying them as traitors and supporters of the alien invasion and burn them alive on make-shift stakes.

The worst of mankind rise and spread riots, robbery, rape and murder, reframing their bloodlust as being freedom fighters who will cleanse the world. Warlords attack the national guard and firefighters, declaring the government an enemy - taken over by alien body snatchers. AI-driven home lab nutcases release deadly viruses, fantasizing themselves as instruments of judgement day.

In the chaos, war breaks out all over the globe. Nobody knows who is fighting whom and why. Black clouds of a burned civilization cover the horizons and above them stand, in ghostly stillness, the mushroom clouds of nuclear explosions like statues of regret over a planet-wide cemetery.

The aliens reconsider.

After hundreds of years of watching us they decide mankind is a lost cause. Only one thing is left to do: this madness must not jump over to other worlds.

No human being sees the aliens leave. As the last tile drops not a single human is alive.

Seeing what is is a deceptively difficult task.

I congratulate the US government on its well thought-out flooding the zone strategy.

It may have saved mankind.

The dystopian future was announcing itself. But I did not wait for it. I left the Cold War. I left it for space.

My father had thousands and thousands of books. They rose in architectural progression shelves over shelves to the heights of human imagination. Their spines and covers were sometimes colorful, others were black, many were serious, some elegant and others nonchalant or ironic and when you stood before these rising walls of books you heard them speak, each in its own voice.

The Cold War was not as mysterious as Johne le Carré would have us believe. It was a bureaucratic distribution of threat, a slow motion approach to instant extinction that was just one red button press away from nuclear inferno.

The Cold War was bureaucratic and of the merciless gray of a corporate ladder.

Soviet tanks stood less than 30 miles from my home town of Vienna. If the Cold War were to turn hot they would in our street within 2 hours. That was the smaller problem. The bigger problem would be the counter strike of our own side. It would be nuclear and none of us would survive.

We were living on a battlefield.

The Man in the Armored Spacesuit

I identified with the man in the armored, black spacesuit on the cover of Alfred Bester’s “The Star are our destination” - retitled in the German translation as “The Revenge of the Cosmonaut”.

His universe was a fireball of explosions. It was as if he were flying through the center of a star and he was surviving. The subtitle suggested that this last survivor of the spaceship Nomad had to - if he wanted to survive - defeat the universe.

He would survive. So you could defeat the universe as it was now?

How could I be like him survive the coming nuclear fireball? Where could I get such an armored spacesuit?

Why we children were so hated so much

I only understood much later why we children were so much hated by the older generations. Why they stared at us with those malevolent eyes and their cruel mouths tightened to a thin line just because we were and even laughing. To them we seemed to be out of place.

Later I understood that those older men and women did not live in the same world as we did. They were stuck in that old war that for us had never happened. It was before we were born. For a child nothing from before its birth was real. As if the world and the child had come into existence a the same time at an absolute hour zero.

But I learned soon that there had been a world before I was born and things had happened in it, terrible wars. I was playing in its bomb craters.

Wars never ended with the armistice. For most, they go on until their death. Those zombies of the war remembered how their personal lives were taken from them in exchange for ideology.

That bitter, old man that cursed us might have come back from war a broken man. Eastern front and then 10 years of Soviet gulag after the war ended. That evil, old woman that broke my glider plane when it dropped on her balcony may have lost her son and her husband in the war and shrank into a bitter, resenting harpy.

They had lost everything. They were the witnesses of the end. And we children had appeared after that end. We had to be monsters. In all this terrible world we were running joyfully and even laughing. As if nothing had happened? We had to monsters.

It was a dystopian world.

I needed distance.

Lightyears of it.

The first spaceport

Space began in the left bedroom book case second shelf from the bottom and went up higher than my lego spaceships would fly without the help of a chair to step on. The planets of the science fiction space were Robert A. Heinlein with “Tunnel to the Stars”, Arthur C. Clarke with “2001 - A Space Odyssey”, Alfred Bester with “The Demolished Man”, Isaac Asimov with his robot stories, A E Van Vogt, Harry Harrison and many others.

Their worlds were dangerous, but never dystopian. Mankind was always in danger, fought and lost and won and lost again. They were never doomed. Fighting spirit and an idea of what tomorrow could be dominated.

When the future is like the past

“War against War” by Ernst Friedrich was the most terrifying portrait of war. It showed portraits of men who had no faces. The meat grinders of World Wr I had turned them into living corpses. This book is one of the most terrible ever published. It shows an underworld of suffering that goes beyond anything a human being should ever have to go through.

Their faces had been shot off, parts of the skull blown away, their eyes gouged. And this book could not do a thing. Rather than a warning it was a documentation of the defeat of humanist ideals.

In Ernst Jünger’s “Storm of Steel” the hero physically goes through years of impossible to survive carnage. The last scene pronounces the end of the war but he does not rejoice his survival. He is just there, and everything around him has lost its meaning.

This did not stop the slaughter because, on a grand scale you cannot move away from something terrible. You can only move towards something better.

The Process of Discovery: Stanislaw Lem

I was in the audience when Stanislaw Lem read at a cafe in Vienna:

”… and the space ship would approach the planet and go into orbit and the astronauts would not know what they would find on that new world. I would not know, either. I had to be with them, land with them on that planet. I would explore the planet with my astronauts”

It was Stanislaw Lem’s process of discovery through writing that was such a contract to the inhuman deathscapes politics had pushed on mankind. This was a way out. This was a way to make the future look different from the past.

Literature as the voice of mankind

Humanism is the foundation of a good future of mankind. Its foundation are the classic ideals of virtue and responsibility, expressed through philosophy and literature, imagined by art and architecture, music and technology. The core of humanism is the dignity of man.

Our failing civilization has fallen into political ideology and defines the human as a cog in a machine. Its materialist emanations fascism, socialism, corporatism, communism may have different expressions but are based on the same inhuman assumption: that the single human being is nothing, and the collective is everything.

Literature tries to hold the line to give ideas for a future that breaks with the horrors of the 20th century. Literature is, when the writing is anchored in a specific voice of a human being that can give a direction for those wanting to move away from the desert of the past and battlefield of the present.

Science fiction, if done well is that literature of the future. If not done well, it succumbs into dystopian nightmares and anti-human cyber tech depression.

The state of absolute happiness

The human being searching for light finds it in literature, in science fiction and other genres. This is how I have found the future and how I will work to make the future different from the past.

It is a path that is open to anyone who wants to walk it. It leads through ourselves and to mankind’s mission.

Mankind has a mission to gain knowledge, explore the universe and gain wisdom. Achieving it is achieving the state of absolute happiness at the philosophers have known it for over 2000 years.

This ultimate happiness will give us the strength to take on the challenge of the interstellar realm, a challenge that will turn out unlike any other challenge mankind has ever encountered.

Even though I was born a quarter century after WWII, we children were instructed about the danger of unexploded bombs and booby traps that in the war killed and crippled so many children.

I had not known what war was, but I heard its echoes. I saw it in the countless bomb craters that still peppered many a field in the outskirts of Vienna. I played in them just as in any other playground. Where there was a bomb crater there was no unexploded bomb.

There were still many destroyed houses and abandoned areas where we should not go because we could blow ourselves up. My grand parents avoided talking about the war. What I heard was just what they said when they thought I was out of listening range.

My grandmother told the story of when she had been bombed out. I learned that this was when you came home and could not find your house any more because it was no longer there. There was just a big hole in the ground filled with rubble that once had been your possessions, your clothes, your books, your bed, your family photos, the landscape of your life.

What was Childhood back then when the bombs fell?

I remember the serenity of life back then. Everything was dead serious, serious as the dead. All of Vienna was like a giant graveyard where everyone walked around and pretended to be the living.

What did I know about war? What did I know what childhood was in a city that burned day and night and more bombs rained down every day? I didn’t know how it was when your ear drums exploded when the pressure wave of a bomb attack hit the cellar you were hiding in. What did I know when you saw your sister cry but couldn’t hear her because your ear drums were gone. How could I know that some children called themselves lucky because it had just been a bomb attack, and not an attack with fire to burn them alive.

I did not know because I never experienced it myself. But I experienced the war through the traces it had left in others.

The Burning Children haunting the Living

There were nights when liquid fire fell from the sky and burned the children and there was no protection against it. Either the fire killed them, or the heat killed them or the fire consumed all oxygen so they asphyxiated in their bomb shelters.

One story stuck to my mind. A group of children ran across the street to reach a bomb shelter while fire was falling from the bombers. The asphalt was boiling hot and soft and the children sank deep into it and got stuck in this bog of asphalt. Then the fire, phosphorus canisters that burned like napalm hit the ground. The air reached a temperature of 1000 degrees. Their flesh ignited and the children burned like candles, their little bodies black like wicks.

The lucky ones had been killed by regular bombs that took the roofs of the houses so the city would burn better.

I had cartoons, too. Children’s stories. But the burning children mingled with them. They showed right next to Bug Bunny. How could you have been a child in those days? Nine year old boys had to go to war and do battle against hardened adults with weapons that did not work.

There was one sound that scared children the most. It was the sound of the cuckoo as it came from the radio. It was different cuckoo call in the forest. That was pleasant and beautiful. When the cuckoo call came out of the radio it was a danger code. Without words it said: bombers are coming to kill you. Go. Run! Hide!

How much children feared the cuckoo’s call back then. They heard and knew: an armada of bombers were coming to burn them alive. Try to hide. They will get you anyway. Your life will end before it has begun. I could not imagine what it had to be like to be a child at that time.

I walked the city and saw the facades of old buildings, still riddled with bullet holes. There were overgrown big holes in the ground. Bomb craters were expected city furniture like benches and traffic lights.

The city had been almost helpless. There were flak towers, built in the style of medieval fortresses. On top of them stood the guns that fired at the bombers I could imagine as the city lay there, the city of all these beautiful buildings and landscapes, how it lay there without protection because the the flak did not keep them away.

Twice Vienna had survived the beleaguering by the ottomans who tried to conquer it and enslave Europe. But Vienna had resisted. Vienna had been their point of return. Vienna had sent them packing. But what could you do against fire falling from the sky.

The Legions of the One-legged Men

In the streets I saw them every day, the one-legged men. They were quiet men, their looks turned inside as they moved along in their one-legged man’s stride with two crutches and one leg, two crutches and one leg, crutches, then leg, crutches, then leg, a terrifying rhythm that was the morse code of their destruction. Every day we saw six, seven, or even ten of them.

We did not count them, as we counted the Volkswagen beetles as they were parked on the roadside. How many of them would there be lined up without interruption by another make of car, an Opel or even one of those rare Mercedes? The record stood at 23.

Those one-legged men were still so present this long after the war. Now at 50, and stuck with the loss of a leg they experienced at 18 or 20 years old. The sun was shining warmly as they moved past, but their look was always to the inside as if the world was making them feel cold.

It was as if the sun were not shining for them. How often had those men asked themselves: what if? What if I had not stepped on that mine that day, what if that machine gun salvo on the Eastern front had not fragmented my leg so badly it could not be saved and had to come off with a saw. What if I had been able to get a medical orderly to pick me up, what if the Russian snipers had not prevented that and I had not lain with my leg shot to pieces for days until the Russians had been pushed back and my friends had gotten to me. By then gangrene had done its destruction and the leg had to come off with a bone saw.

And how he remembered that vibration of the saw when it cut into his bone. He would never forget it. It had been in one of those front emergency stations. It was just a table, an old dining room table in a tent and they orderly had knocked him out because they had not had any anesthetics.

When they had carried him back to their own lines and put him on the table and he had been so full of pain and fear and told them to leave him his leg? There were already three sawed-off legs lying in a heap on the ground waiting for his to be thrown on top. They would throw them out later, those legs, out on the trash heap. This had made him a one-legged man, isolated from the rest of the world and from sunshine.

So they walked by, those one-legged men, so quiet 35 years after the war and the war had been with them every day since in the vibration of the saw that cut into their bone and they had felt it every day they since that day, that day on the Eastern front. They went to bed one-legged and woke up from a one-legged nightmare and were still one-legged in the morning.

One-legged men had been so ubiquitous that in the hit show of the Austrian 70s “Kottan investigates” about a crazy cop in an even crazier Police department, the comrade of that detective had been a one-legged man. The actor had lost his leg in the war.

The Black Hole of War

War was in every adult I met. It was in the teacher. It was in the shoe maker. It was in the grocer, the insurance agent, the poet, the painter, the trader, the merchant… They had been in a war and had seen things they could not forget and could not talk about. They were in a war that never ended.

Nobody talked about the war even though it was still going on in their minds. They had come back from a nightmare that had swallowed up their personal lives and the sunshine and their friends without giving them anything in return.

This was not life, this was survival. And in those dark days that even faded the sunshine they heard the echo of war. It never stopped. It stood between them and their life, their humanness and the world. It was an entry into an underworld garden by what they had experienced.

How cold a child, who did not know ever hope to reach them?

The future

The future does not have to look like the past. It will look like the past if we do not decide and work to change it. When I, the child discovered the science fiction collection among the thousands of books my father I was saved. I had found a path into a future that was… promising!

Part II of this essay is about that future.