hen I was a kid, my age just a single digit, my entire world was made up of the part of Brooklyn's Ocean Parkway bounded by Avenues O and P. Whatever I did with my friends there, whatever bizarre city skills that we evidenced, we thought that we were the best at them in the world—the speed with which we rode our bikes, the distance that we could fling our paper airplanes, the number of times we could run up and down the stairs of our apartment buildings without pausing for breath.
But then, as we got older, that boundary expanded, and we learned that there was a talent pool out there not limited to just the few kids on our street. We suddenly had stiff competition when it came time to see who could bounce a rubber ball the highest. The wider neighborhood we discovered beyond our block, and then the other neighborhoods that bordered it, contained its own talent, and as we faced them on the childhood fields of battle (for what else is the search for the best wiggler of ears but a battle?) and learned that we were not alone, we also learned that there were other kids out there who were better than us. Some of us were able to remain stars in that new scheme of things, but most others lost their titles and sank back into normality.
The lesson that the wider our world became the less likely we were to remain champions was not a welcome one, and the fact that we were rewarded by observing the performances of more-talented athletes (if those arcane skills could be considered either talents or athletic) wasn't enough compensation to make up for that life lesson. It hurt. And so, as I've been watching the games of the XXVIII Olympiad in Athens, I've been thinking back to those times, and pondering a particularly science-fictional question—when our planetary neighborhood finally expands beyond Earth, as it eventually will, how will the human race cope when we have to compete against the universe?
Get ready for an alien olympics
Science and science fiction have long conspired to tell me that this will someday happen. Science figured out the odds of intelligent life in the universe, and science fiction told me what that intelligent life will do with us (or to us) if it ever gets here. It could take centuries, millennia or even longer, but odds are that eventually aliens will arrive to either trade or invade, changing entirely the world and our place in it.
But for all of the fictional scenarios in which we are tamed or eaten or given technology beyond our wildest dreams, I can't recall one (though you might; feel free to jump in here) which has thought to ask what we will do if they are simply better than us in all of the ways that humanity has measured.
Swimmer Michael Phelps, who started off his participation in this latest Olympics by breaking the world record and winning a gold medal in the 400-meter individual medley—how will he feel if an intelligent aquatic visitor can break his record without breaking a sweat? (Will aliens even turn out to sweat?) How will gold-medal weightlifter Udomporn Polsak feel should an alien drop from the skies who can toss around her weights like scraps of tinfoil?
What will happen to the psyche of the human race when our best and our brightest learn that there are better and brighter stars out there in the sky?
Part of me fears that the self-esteem of our species will be crushed—I know when my world expanded I didn't like the fact that there were others who could climb the monkey bars faster than me. But deep inside, I know that we will behave as we did back on Ocean Parkway when we learned that the top dog doesn't always remain the top dog. We found ways to deal with it, and survive.
By the time we need to place a gold medal around the neck of a four-armed alien as the Alpha Centauri anthem plays, I'm going to trust that we'll be ready for it.
Scott Edelman started his trek to the editor-in-chief position at Science
Fiction Weekly decades ago, when he began working as an assistant editor at
Marvel Comics. Between these two positions, this four-time Hugo Award nominee in
the category of Best Editor was the founding editor of the
award-winning magazine Science Fiction Age, in addition to editing
Sci-Fi Universe, Sci-Fi Flix and Satellite Orbit. Currently, he also edits SCI
FI, the official magazine of the SCI FI Channel. His most recent short story appears in the new anthology Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic.
