Thrill Seekers

Thrill Seekers

When many people tell me about one of their beliefs, I see excitement in their eyes and hear enthusiasm in their voices. While I do understand the buzz behind belief in guardian angels, the Roswell UFO story, or a precise and imminent doomsday date, I do not see any kind of irreplaceable value in these kinds of claims specifically. We can find plenty of thrills in other places, too. Furthermore, isn’t a joy or thrill that comes from a mistake, delusion, or lie a kind of counterfeit high anyway? Sure, it might feel good—but for how long and at what cost? If some practical joker gave me a fake lottery ticket with a winning number on it, I might feel really, really good—right up to the moment when I tried to cash it in. My previous joy wouldn’t be enough to make the disappointment and anger worth it. Likewise, getting drunk or high might feel good in the moment, but spending every day of one’s life that way might result in self-destruction and a wasted life.

I’m not denying that some beliefs can add spice to a life. What I don’t accept is that these beliefs are the only way or the best way to elude boredom. Yes, believing in amazing and weird things can be fun and exciting. However, embracing beliefs that fall short on evidence and logical arguments because one gets a kick out of them seems like cheating to me. It’s turning off your brain in order to grab a cheap high. It’s like closing your eyes and spinning around in circles on your front lawn while imagining that you are on the roller coaster. Why the charade? Why not just open your eyes and go find a real roller coaster?

I often wonder how much thought believers give to what reality offers them. Why worry about invisible mystical forces that science can’t detect, measure, or confirm when there are real things like nebulae and black holes out there? Why chase mythical monsters when all around us there are more bizarre creatures that exist than we can ever know in a lifetime? The real universe is not a bitter pill to be choked down. It’s the ultimate theme park and your human brain is the golden ticket. This is a place of infinite excitement and mystery. Depending on where you are and where you look, it offers many comforts and many dangers.

When I was a young boy in Florida, I remember finding a Portuguese man o’ war that had washed up on a lonely strip of coastline I was exploring. I was blown away by the bizarre creature. It was so alien in appearance, so unlike anything I had ever seen before. It was at once monstrous and beautiful. The longer I looked at it, the less it seemed to belong on this planet. Its purple-tinted, gas-filled, transparent bubble enabled it to float at sea. It was shaped in a way that made it an effective sail for traveling many miles in the ocean. I was amazed by the creepy and dangerous purple tentacles. I tried to imagine how much it would hurt if I touched one briefly. I chose not to find out. I already loved science fiction in those days, so extraterrestrial life was one of my many interests, and this thing pushed my buttons, to say the least. I knew it was an Earth life-form, of course, but its freaky structure led me to think more deeply about what life might be like on other worlds and how there is so much variety right here. I disagree with those who suggest that extraterrestrial life, if it exists and if we discover it, would be so exotic and unexpected in form that it would shock everyone. I doubt this because our own planet has such extreme diversity that if we ever did find anything, chances are a zoologist, microbiologist, or marine biologist somewhere would immediately say, “Hey that looks just like . . . ” The alien physiology, how it functions, likely would be different from anything we know, of course, but chances are its appearance would be similar to something here on Earth. That’s just how wonderfully weird and varied Earth life is. It’s almost like we have an entire universe of life right here with us. All we need to do is notice it.

Fast-forward to adulthood, and I’m giving a science lecture to a class of very bright students in the Caribbean. We’re talking about ocean life and I’m showing beautiful color photographs of amazing animals only recently discovered in extremely deep waters. I mention to the kids that many of the creatures seem like aliens, as if they don’t belong on Earth. But then I wonder aloud if life on a faraway planet would look like anything on Earth. Maybe they are so different that we don’t have anything of a similar shape and structure on our world. Maybe they are intelligent clouds of organic fog. Maybe they are liquid and flow together to create one big conscious ocean. Maybe their “bodies” are a network of atoms spread apart over vast distances in space. Or maybe they don’t exist at all. Maybe we are alone in the universe. Maybe we are the first life ever. Or maybe we are the last. I have no idea, but I love asking the questions and imagining possible answers. That was an exciting class for me and for the students that day—even though we never once relied on irrational beliefs or felt the need to accept any unsupported claims.

Back on that Florida coastline so many years ago, I probably stared at the Portuguese man o’ war for at least an hour. In kid time, that’s like ten hours. I resisted my little-boy urge to pop the bubble with a stick and instead pushed it back out to sea. I couldn’t tell if it was alive or dead, but if it was still alive, I was determined to save it. Anything that strange and that cool deserves to live, I figured. From that day on, the man o’ war would always be one of my favorite marine animals and easily my number-one jellyfish—only it’s no jellyfish.

I later learned that the creature I had encountered was even stranger than I thought. It turns out that the Portuguese man o’ war is not a jellyfish at all. It’s not even one animal. Each man o’ war is a colony of many individual creatures. They team up to create a floating, carnivorous fortress that sails the seas in search of fish to paralyze and eat. I also learned along the way that these amazing animals can release the gas from their bubble to submerge like a submarine when attacked and that sometimes their tentacles grow to more than one hundred feet in length. There is a lesson in this story somewhere: Thinking like a scientist is the gift that keeps on giving. It’s a never-ending process of discovery. New information is always coming in, or will if your brain is open to it. I am no less curious today than I was as a child. I don’t cringe when I find out I was wrong about something; I celebrate the upgrade to my brain.

This willingness to adapt and change for the better is important to being a good skeptic. As a lifelong fan of science, I have no choice but to be humble. I can’t imagine being any other way. I try to explore and learn new things every day. And the more I learn, the more I sense how deep and wide my ignorance runs. This is not a bad thing. My awareness of it makes life more exciting. I love knowing that I’ll never run out of things to learn and experience. This is one of the reasons I find it nearly impossible to get excited about extraordinary claims about events, abilities, or monsters that don’t seem reasonable and lack good evidence. I know about too many wonders that actually do exist or are more likely to exist than to get all worked up over things that almost certainly do not.