Obsessed with the Unknown

After watching Ad Astra on a long flight, I was reminded of the power of a good story and was pleasantly surprised that movies can still retain the concept of love, yet not have it be between a man and a woman.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a good love story.

But this time it was between a son and his father. A sad one at best. These types of relationships should be explored more, as we sometimes fail to reflect on the relationships that pervade our lives.

Another underlying, yet important relationship was explored in the movie — and that was our human fascination and almost obsession with finding “intelligent life” outside of the earth.

Us humans have become so enthralled with finding life outside of the earth, we have this impulse to continue to search and search as part of the greater quest for more knowledge. Or maybe it’ll help us know that we aren’t alone in this ever-expanding universe. Or maybe it’ll give us hope to conquer another star as we are working hard on destroying the only home we know.

But what happens in the movie is that, spoiler alert, the human explorers never find intelligent life. All that time and money and hard work that was spent on searching for beings that we could communicate with — is lost.

But there is always the next question of — what if?

And we may never find out that answer. Maybe it is one of those questions that are not meant to be answered like:

Why are we here?

Who or what started this whole thing?

What is intelligence, consciousness, and love?

Is my reality the only reality that matters/exists?

I don’t know why it is important for us to wrestle with these questions or why we find it intriguing enough to continuously write stories and make moves about it — when at the end of the day, there are no concrete answers.

We are human, we have emotions, are guided by emotion and dopamine rushes, and will always continuously search for the truth that underlies our perception of reality.

Thanks for reading.

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