Back in the 80s, we still found it fun to believe (somewhat) in aliens, spaceships, far-away galaxies, and groovy shows about star-trekking explorers from famous 60s-era t.v. shows. In fact, it was still so popular, one enterprising professor at Oneonta State decided to capitalize on the infamy behind such grand delusions by advertising a physics class with "Star Trek" placed cleverly in the class title. Aha!
Me, my friend "Weeg" (Hi, Kirk!), and my boy "DutchBoy" (Esse!) decided to take the class together, and we swore before the semester started that we would attend every class "high", meeting before each class to smoke a joint. As far as stoner's plans go, you can imagine that we did not adhere to a strict schedule of attendance or party planning, but we were there for the very first class sitting together, wasted and ready for our next alien encounter to begin. Beam us up!
Our professor was a rather modest, drab-looking older man in his late 50s, bald, with a droopy pocket-protector full of pens to go with his plain white button-down shirt and saggy black pants. Here we go! Game on, friend. He introduced himself to us with a bit about his background: he used to work for S.E.T.I. (right on right on, we gave each other encouraging smiles), now defunct as an organization, which he laughingly explained as to his presence at our small upstate New York college in the Catskill Mountains (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catskill_Mountains). Okay, that explained why he was here. But, like, how many times has he been probed on-board "The Mothership"? You know? Some key data was missing, here.
We met after class to talk it over, using our childish fantasies to explain away his bland demeanor about our starry-eyed dreams of space exploration. Okay, like, maybe he's just burnt-out from teaching all year (yeah, yeah) or getting kicked out of the space program? Nah! He's probably just scared that they'll come back for him and take him away for more testing because he talked to us about it. Yeah! That's it! That's totally it! You could imagine his hesitance about having more invasive anal procedures done by unfeeling mutant aliens. I mean, that would freak out anyone, right?
Yeah, I don't know...our whole pot-smoking-in-space vibe was quickly coming apart at the seams, confronted by the real science of scanning the skies in a vast universe too big for our calculations. This wasn't the sexy "Barberella" movie version my boys were looking for. As the semester progressed, we tenuously clung to our rapidly evaporating faith in all things alien, but we continued to bolster each other up in rather a adolescent fashion that belied our need for supportive theories. Maybe he's, like, an alien come here to gradually introduce his culture to us, and, like, he's gonna rip off his human face mask to reveal his gnarly reptilian face to us at the last class! No way! That's totally it.
We grooved on the belief that our teacher was really a visiting alien in disguise—but, like, totally friendly and stuff, 'cause he's teachin' us about his ways and all at this school, so he's cool, he won't eat us at the end of class, right?—but it was becoming rapidly apparent that we were actually taking a real physics class, with tests and equations and stuff. Oh, shit...my boys tapped out of future classes a bit more on the regular, as I did, though DutchBoy stayed true to the faith, because he wanted to believe, man. So did we all, but after awhile, the coursework replaced our past delusions, to create a real interest in working with the stars, which was the whole point behind the class.
It's easy to make up a fictionalized account of the world then it is to accept the truth sometimes, and as young adults, we were clearly moving towards reality faster and faster. We were leaving behind our childhood forever, and that was scary at times. What will we be like as adults? Will we suck like most people? That was more horrifying to us than a people-eating alien reptile; losing the core of our identities to the workaday world of office drones and typical assholes who cared more about their cars than life itself. We never wanted to be like that, and with one very special class taught to us at just the right time in our lives, we saw a way out, to a life of the mind that was more fascinating than some cheesy fantasy concocted by Hollywood. I mean, who the fuck were they anyway? Actor-types! No, thanks.
I wanted to in "the real" with them during class, and I found that the abstract quality of our calculations were just as silly as some of the early paintings and psychedelic scribblings that I did to entertain myself back then, as a teenager attending college. Instead of dressing up in stupid space costumes, I wanted to become more like the scientist leading the class. That's where the real entertainment was for us, as scholars. Besides, I wouldn't be working with fantasists after graduation. I'd be working with real people right here on Planet Earth, and it was that very down-to-earth quality that marks excellent teaching that drew me into the class and kept me there for an entire semester, when other kids dropped out in the face of math and science and the vastness of the stars.
I loved it, and I was surprised at how easily this language spoke to me. Maybe I'd already been to the stars and back as a time-traveler? Who knows? Suddenly, it seemed more plausible than anything I'd ever seen before. I replaced the fuzzy visions in my head based on t.v. show toys with wormholes hidden into the very fabric of space, vaulting through Horsehead Nebulas and planets that rained bright red rubies, because all of that seemed more possible to me than tentacled purple space aliens with ray-guns. Outer space became tangible and real to me, much closer than the obstructing view of popular culture, and way more plausible, even practical, given the right math.
For our very last class of the year, our Prof gave us our final assignment, based on the formula they used (and discarded) at S.E.T.I. to calculate that amount of possible Earth-like planets in the universe. We were suckers for it immediately, as we put it off for its daunting task. He really asked us to solve the question of all life in the universe, and is that even possible? We looked at the math with downcast eyes. I'd always found most everyday math problematic for me, but this was different. I needed to keep my grades up for my last semester at Oneonta, locking in my transfer to RISD to keep that process going smoothly. What if I sucked at this? I'd get a bad grade that'd put my entire future in jeopardy, like an astronaut quickly calculating his re-entry on the fly, with all instruments down.
As we turned in our paperwork for that last class, I nervously sat forward in my seat. As our teacher took the last paper from a rather Lawngisland-looking girl with huge 80s hair, my heart pounded. Uh, oh. This is it. We'd talked with enough students to know that, as a class, we were totally fucking lost as to what the "right" numbers could be. It was anyone's guess, and that's exactly what our teacher said next. As he leaned on the last stair of the front row, next to the girl's desk, he told us the truth that they discovered at SETI, when they finally closed the program due to a lack of finding and findings: there is no way to calculate how many Earth-like planets may exist in the universe.
We breathed a sigh of relief. He wasn't going to grade our papers. Cool! Maybe this is his "big reveal", Dutchboy wondered to me. Nah...but, what is it? He told us the truth about all of his work in the field of astrophysics thus far, and that's what the real bombshell of his class was about: there is no math to explain our universe that's provable, just as there is no equation that disproves the existence of G-d, and with one last look downward, he finally gave it up to us in that classroom. He believed that our life on Earth was miraculous and unexplainable in the extreme. There was no other way to put it. He'd found faith.
We felt kinda bad for him. They must have ostracized the poor guy at Trekkie conventions after that particular admission. Boy...some class, huh? We looked at each other for awhile, outside of the lecture hall. And that was it. The was the end of my college career at Oneonta. There were absolutely no little green people floating in a spinning space disk, so improbable that it was laughable to a real scientist. There wasn't any weirdly surreal space dust that grabbed you and flung you inter-dimensionally. No, we had something far greater. We had each other. We had us, right here on Earth, and that turned out to be the best alien scenario, yet. Tough act to follow, right? I finally walked away from the carelessness of my young mind towards a much sharper, brighter future. I had everything to look forward to back then. Still do.
