by Shaun Lawton
I've come to realize that it takes a much stronger and more developed imagination to conceptualize the nature of our actual reality than it does to conjure up excursions into the fantastical. Case in point:
When astronomers spotted the anomalous elongated comet Oumuamua in the Fall of 2017, with its accompanying peculiarities (such as the direction and rate of its travel) the sort of limited, kneejerk imagination that fuels speculations it might be an emissary of an alien race invariably popped up across the internet the world over, and its because that sort of interpretation gets elicited in an extemporaneous manner precisely due to a lack of imagination.
Recently an article in Scientific American recounts a second interstellar object has been spotted by an amateur astronomer, and immediately another wave of impulsive speculation arose online yesterday that this might be evidence of a greater fleet of extraterrestrials now arriving on their mission targeting our solar system and Earth.
I'm writing this brief essay to point out that this is not an example of imaginative speculation, but rather, quite the opposite. It's just a commonly expressed idea being regurgitated almost involuntarily by sectors of our population that lack the requisite imagination to visualize alternative examples of what might explain Oumuamua's eccentric characteristics. That takes a real developed and first-rate imagination.
For example, anyone who stops to think about alternative scenarios from the patently cliched "alien invasion" hypothesis concerning these anomalous celestial objects spotted passing through our solar system could also, given that they were indeed possessed of a modicum of imaginative capacity, hypothetically visualize in their mind's eye an approaching aggregate of asteroids or comets, of which Oumuamua in 2017 may have been the first to pass through our solar system, only to be followed by several more now and perhaps sometime in the near future to eventually reach a peak of numbers conveyed through our galactic neighborhood on such a long distance trajectory that it accounts for the greater velocity and direction of their course, etc. This mere exercise in our use of imagination shows a much greater degree and capacity to imagine than any cardboard cookie cut-out examples that haunt the popular domain, such as aliens coming to invade.
My point in having written this brief essay is to merely suggest that we all try harder to imagine what really happened when presented with so-called evidence of anomalous phenomena, if we really want to cultivate a stronger and better developed imagination for ourselves. The nature of our actual existence here in the real world, suspended in constant motion among a staggering array of celestial objects, requires an unparalleled faculty of imagination to even begin to get a general sense of its enormity and complexity.
The moral of this story remains simply that if we wish to sharpen our imaginations to their optimal cutting edge capacity, we must practice staying focused on what happens to be real rather than on the fantastical and that which we know not to exist. It may boil down to the simple principle that aspiring writers learned in elementary school: before you begin to try to break the rules of grammar, it's always best to learn them first.
I'd wager it's the same with our aptitude for imagination. The more we've aligned our minds with a realistic sense of perspective, the greater our capacity to improve our imagination of the truly fantastical.