LICC - Connecting with Culture - The science of aliens

Have you ever seen a skywhale? It's a rather beautiful animal, over five metres long and weighing 600kg, which glides slowly on thermals above pagoda forests. How about a gulphog? That's more frightening - a 500kg predatorthat lives in stinger-fan forests and can run at 60kph.

If the answer is no - and it will be - it'll be because they (probably) don't exist. That, however, has not stopped the Science Museum from exploring what they, and other alien life forms, might look like, in its exhibition the Science of Aliens, which opened in London last week. Alien life has long been an established feature of our fears and fictions. But the exhibition goes further by inventing two planets, Aurelia and Blue Moon, and imagining what life on them might look like. Alongside skywhales and gulphogs, we see six-legged mudpods, microscopic hysterias and thousand-metre pagoda trees. If some of these wonderfully strange aliens also seem strangely familiar, it's for a reason. Wherever it might evolve, life will face similar problems and invariably converge on similar solutions. There are, after all, only so manyways of (for instance) seeing and flying.

Despite the breathtaking variety of life on Earth - and the exhibition reminds us that our planet is home to creatures at least as strange as those on Aurelia - there is order within the apparent chaos, a balance between freedom and necessity so exquisite that you can almost hear the morning stars singing together in celebration of it. The Science of Aliens is, of course, a work of imagination. Yet, as is so often the case, it is our imagination that inspires us and orients us towards our Creator. Perhaps it is that which underlies those inspiring, frustrating chapters at the end of the book of Job. When God speaks, we want an answer to Job's questions. We want logic, reasoning, analysis. Instead, we get questions and we get wonder. Who do you think you are? Who do you think I am? Where were you whenI laid Aurelia's foundations? Can you make a pet of the skywhale?

Nick Spencer