In a recent article in the New York Times, the excellent columnist Olivia Judson (an evolutionary biologist) noted:
". . .there’s no need to invent monsters: you just need to imagine how terrifying it would be if ants were the size of rhinos."
I would like to shout "huzzah" to this and add to the sentiment. My personal belief has long been that the imagination of monsters natural, supernatural and alien springs from the unwieldy, even somewhat catastrophic knowledge the race of humans secretly owns about the near-unimaginable strangeness of thousands of our fellow species here on earth.
Specifically I would like to point out that if one were to spend half an hour looking at any book with close up photographs of common insects, one would have to be convinced that we are living in a world literally crawling with bizarre monsters that feature as much oddity as any we might ever find on any distant planet in our supposed interplanetary future.
Can we hope (or fear) to discover anything anywhere that will be as weird or as creepy as the type of fly that buries its young in the throat of a living deer, and in which its young multiply and fatten, only to fly eventually out of the deer's mouth having mostly destroyed the deer's ability to swallow (leaving it for dead)? Or how about those worms that get into people's eyes and grow gigantic and then slither out of the corners of the poor host's eyes when they feel a need to move on to the next nefarious stage of their squirming, alien existence?
Indeed, review the heads of insects close up with their giant multifaceted eyes and their merciless cutting jaws and read some about their entirely shocking antics--you'll come away shivering with horror; and it will be made worse to know these tiny wretches are currently in the business of making up the majority of the earth's biomass (or perhaps you will fall in love with the little creeps and become a candidate entomologist).
Further, I believe our collective subconscious (let's assume for a moment Jung had a point) registers all this and agrees that we are better served by inventing fantastic versions of these biological realities than by learning in depth about the reality of their biology. This is because, by projecting them out as fantasies, we can put them collectively at a distance and claim they're certainly terrifying but not "real"; and when it comes to science fiction and the hunt for alien life we can even project that they are "far away"; all more comforting fodder than to spend time thinking about the motes in your own eye right now; or the microscopic bugs that infest your pillow (dust mites) that, when blown up to poster size outclass in awfulness the most awful fantasies ever churned out by Hollywood or even folklore.
Ms. Judson's article was partly about the coming Year of Biodiversity and she calls for a "Wild Celebration" of same and I suppose therefore it may be the wrong time for me to be carping about the horror inspired in me by so many of our fellow bio-travelers on this planet (especially the very small ones) stocked so richly with biological wonders.
In any case I certainly hope we never discover any outer-space-creature weirder than any typical insect already on this planet. I don't think I will be able to stand it.
