Will Space Aliens Get Therapy?

As I open my laptop, planet earth, with all its mottled greens and blues, appears on my screen in a space of pitch blackness. Along the circumference, there’s a halo—the delicate layer of atmosphere shielding us from radiation and cosmic rays—which scientists call earth’s limb. They should probably call it earth’s phantom limb: it’s barely there.

I’ve seen this wallpaper a hundred times already, yet looking at it this morning, I sense a hollow, aching numbness in my chest. Before I can think too deeply about my reaction, the face of my 9:00 a.m. client replaces the image of the earth on the screen.

“I’m homesick,” she says, after we exchange greetings. “I should never have left San Francisco.” She pulls tissues from somewhere off camera to wipe tears from her cheeks. Three months ago, on a whim, she’d accepted a nursing job in a city hospital in Florida.

“There’s grief coming up,” I remark, hoping to help her stay with what she’s feeling and facilitate an emotional shift or insight. Experiencing sadness openly is new for her.

“I had no idea how much I loved living where I lived.” Her shoulders shudder under a fresh wave of grief. “I miss my old neighborhood. The fir trees, the view from my studio—even the junkie who used to ask me for change when I came home from work.” Then, as if a switch has been flipped in her brain, the sorrow evaporates, replaced by a polite smile I’ve seen many times since we started working together a few months ago.

“Anyway, it’s pointless to be sad,” she says, waving a hand in front of the screen.

“You’ve said you want to get clear about what matters to you,” I remind her, “so you can feel confident about decisions you make in the future. Maybe feeling your sadness is part of that process.”

“I don’t see the connection,” she says. “Sadness is just sad.”

This isn’t the insight I was hoping for, but I know from experience that when I push my feel-your-sadness agenda with clients, we get into fruitless power struggles.

“Moving forward, if I see a connection, may I point that out?” I ask.

“Sure,” she says.

Not a particularly transformational moment, but it’s a start.

Five hours later, I’m sitting with a friend in a restaurant near Georgetown University in Washington, DC. We’ve eaten a late lunch, so we don’t get hungry during the two-hour lecture we’re about to attend: “Earth at the Crossroads: A Cosmic Perspective on Environmental Crisis.”

When my friend, who works at the university, invited me to the lecture, I’d been mildly interested. But when she announced she’d finagled me in as her guest, I found myself remembering a handful of unfinished tasks in need of my attention. A multidisciplinary panel of experts would be talking about space exploration and how it relates to earth’s sustainability efforts, the goal being to reduce environmental harm by inspiring attendees to take action, ultimately creating a ripple effect of collective responsibility.

“Oh, come on,” my friend had urged when I told her I wasn’t sure I could make it. “The change of pace will do you good.”

I rarely take a cosmic perspective on anything, particularly in my clinical work. In most situations, inviting a client to imagine what their problems might look like from Mars or Saturn would come across as insensitive or cruel—though you might be able to get away with it in existential therapy. And if a client started discussing the sun, red dwarves, or Jupiter’s moons, I’d assume they were dissociating from their present struggles. You mentioned your wife forgot your birthday. What’s happening inside that led you to change the topic to outer space?

And a cosmic perspective on climate change? Although this interests my friend, who’s researching deserts, volcanoes, and other inhospitable places for a book she’s writing about the African Rift Valley, most people I know don’t seem to view climate change as the kind of stressor it’s appropriate to unpack in your average therapy session. Of course, scientists might have a different perspective.

“You know what’s weird?” I tell my friend. “In the nearly 20 years that I’ve worked as a therapist, I’ve never had a single scientist come to me for therapy.”

She raises an eyebrow and empties her coffee cup. The waiter clears away our plates.

“I doubt too many scientists seek out therapy,” she muses. “They don’t strike me as people who’d be interested in spending a lot of time mulling over feelings. Right now, they’ve got bigger fish to fry, like saving the planet.”

Rain on Titan

We walk up a narrow street, through a wrought-iron gate, and toward a cluster of red brick buildings surrounded by a green, well-tended lawn. We pass clusters of students, enter a spacious building, and take an elevator up several floors to a library. A few young people nap on couches while others whisper by stacks of books.

It’s been a long time since I was on a college campus. I wish I could curl up on a couch or chat with a fellow student about classes, music, and literature. Am I jealous of these kids? Maybe a little. What I miss most about being in college isn’t my bygone youth, reading all day, hanging out with friends, or flirting to my heart’s content. What I miss is the hopeful trepidation that comes when you’re on the cusp of learning new things and don’t know what direction you’ll end up taking, out of the millions of directions your life could move in. I miss the sense of inhabiting a reality threaded through with boundless possibilities.

For these students, boundless possibilities must feel a lot less boundless than they did when I was their age. Since birth, they’ve been steeped in news about basal melting under artic glaciers, oceans heating up, and sea levels rising. In the fall, the foliage they see is mostly brown and gray—dull compared to the oranges, reds, and yellows I grew up with. Winter resembles a dreary, cold spring more than it does any of the snow-covered images of houses and trees we’re used to seeing on Christmas cards.

If nature were a new client describing its presenting problems, most therapists would assume it was married to a narcissist, in an abusive relationship, or suffering from a personality disorder—maybe even all three at once. There are fewer bumblebees and more diseases. Birds have changed their migration patterns. Air pollution is worsening. Animals emerge from hibernation earlier, struggling to survive eroding habitats. Recently, in my own backyard, an azalea bush bloomed a few weeks early, and a stealthy hailstorm snuck past the weather apps and tore the blossoms to shreds.

My friend opens a door, and we step into a crowded, sunlit auditorium. On a raised dais, several women seated in folding chairs begin talking. One of them—who introduces herself as a research scientist—describes what oceans are like on other planets. The majority, she explains, lie below the surface, under a crust of ice. As I settle into my chair, I glance at the time on my phone. Two full hours of science speak? What if a combination of boredom, a full stomach, and motionlessness makes me drowsy? I don’t want to embarrass my friend in front of her colleagues by nodding off in my chair, mouth agape. I’m used to attending lectures on the human mind, relationships, and emotions. Space isn’t my thing. I’m out of my element.

“Titan has clouds,” the research scientist says, “but they’re not made of water vapor, as they are on earth. They’re made of methane, ethane, and complex nitriles.” I was expecting her to sound more like a stereotypical scientist—more neutral. Instead, she sounds like a poet losing herself in the cadences and rhythms of a beloved poem. “We see rain on Titan carving beautiful rivers,” she continues, her hand moving as if tracing one of these otherworldly rivers in midair. “We see it etch patterns in the moon’s surface and pool in giant lakes the size of our great lakes or even larger—massive bodies of a liquid completely different from any liquids on earth.”

A chief investigator for the Dragonfly mission—which apparently will entail landing a quadrocopter on one of Saturn’s moons—breaks into the discussion to talk about the haze formation there. “Titan is a window into ancient earth,” she says, her voice as passionate and lyrical as the research scientist’s. “We’re actually learning about ourselves when we explore nearby planets.” Nearby means at a distance of a billion kilometers, I find out later—which to planetary researchers, is just across the proverbial cosmic street.

My friend may be right. It’s hard to imagine these people peeling themselves away from something as vast and all-encompassing as the cosmos to engage in weekly therapy. I’m sure they’ve got complicated personal lives and get into petty conflicts like the rest of us, but my guess is that in therapy, they’d be itching to wrap up early so they could go study hydrothermal vents or look for prebiotic chemicals on a 50-million-year-old planet.

A Therapeutic Voyager

“I love your necklace,” I say. A flying saucer pendant hangs from a gold chain on the neck of an astrobiologist standing in front of me in line for the bathroom. I recognize her from the panel.

She smiles and shows me a ring on one of her fingers with two alien heads shaped like triangles. “And my Voyager pin,” she confides, lowering her chin and touching her lapel.

“Wow.” As I lean forward to examine it, I flash back to an old photo my mom kept of me and a few of my third-grade besties in front of the National Air and Space Museum, where I first learned about the Voyager. “I can’t remember what was on it—do you?”

“Random stuff Carl Sagan thought aliens might find interesting about us,” she says. “Recordings of earth sounds, thunder, traffic, whale songs. Photos of animals, drawings of DNA. I think there was a picture of a naked man and woman on it, too.”

What would it be like to hear earth sounds out of context, I wonder, in a way where they elicited no emotional associations? To aliens, traffic—assuming they had ears to hear it—would probably be a staticky buzzing noise, whale songs a reverberating echo, thunder a string of meaningless acoustic rumbles. I think of my own field and the things we deem important.

What would therapists put on their version of Carl Sagan’s Voyager to give aliens a peek into humans’ inner lives? A feelings wheel divided into colorful slices of sad, mad, scared, happy, strong, and calm? Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs? Stephen Karpman’s drama triangle? Would they include a clip from an episode of Orna Guralnik’s Couples Therapy series? As I dry my hands under an eco-friendly hand dryer and leave the bathroom, I wonder if aliens would ever get their own version of therapy or care at all about human self-actualization.

Too Dumb

After the break, I return to the panel, where the president and CEO of an organization called SETI—which searches for life and intelligence beyond earth—shows us a drawing of the sun with three planets next to it.

“Here’s the planet that’s too close to the sun for life to thrive,” he says, indicating the planet above the words too hot. “Here’s the one that’s too far away from the sun.” He pauses, pointing at the planet by the words too cold. “And here we are, this planet right in the middle.” He points at earth and reads the next words out loud. “Too dumb.”

Laughter ripples through the audience. The director of NASA’s Astrobiology Institute claims she sometimes loses hope in humanity’s ability to change and describes herself as an ethical pessimist. Another scientist counters with, “We need to be cynical optimists!” He mentions the Montreal protocol, which outlawed ozone-depleting substances and was adopted by every country around the world. “We can do that again,” he insists. Others agree.

Maybe we can begin to hold wealthy individuals and corporations accountable for harmful excesses. Maybe we will unite despite our ideological and political differences and tip the scales on ignorance and greed, convincing governments to shift the global economy from an overreliance on fossil fuels to one that runs on green energy. Maybe, according to many of these cynically optimistic experts, if we communicate better, do more outreach, give more talks about aspects of the environment people can relate to in their own hometowns, parks, and backyards, the knowledge we share can help galvanize everyone to act as environmental stewards.

My ears perk up when I hear the word communication. This is where therapists like me excel—virtually all our clients come in wanting to learn how to communicate better with someone: a spouse, a boss, a healthcare customer-service representative. We might be able to spearhead scientist–therapist coalitions for climate-change advocacy. Therapists could expand their perspectives beyond the field of psychology by absorbing important nuts-and-bolts climate-change data to ground them in bigger-picture realities, while equally motivated scientists could learn useful communication life hacks (“I” statements, soft startups, active-listening techniques) which might disarm stubborn climate deniers. It’d be like an experimental language-exchange program for rescuing the human race.

Someone cites data showing a resurgence of climate-change denial nationwide. The president of SETI responds, “Climate deniers are taking the wrong lesson if they think just because climate fluctuated in the past it’s okay to mess with the arctic. If you mess with the arctic, it’ll bite you back.” Someone else makes a plug for biodiversity repositories, and one panelist mentions how much she hates it when people talk about Mars as a viable plan B. “Like, we can trash our own planet because we’ve got another one to go to?!” In an optimistic moment, the ethical pessimist insists there are still pathways to bring ecosystems back and cope with rising sea levels if we act now, rather than waiting 30 more years.

Suddenly, I feel nauseous and claustrophobic. Telling myself I’m doing enough as a therapist seems like a copout. Does it count that I’m a vegan and an avid recycler? Or saving up to buy an electric car? In my heart, I know investing in this cause isn’t solely about what I buy or don’t buy: it’s about admitting that even though I may well be a decent, caring person, I’m still a bona fide, card-carrying member of the dumb planet. The problem isn’t just greedy CEOs and their shareholders. The problem is also me.

Anticipatory Cosmic Homesickness

As my friend and I rise to leave, it feels like I’ve stepped off a gravity ride in an amusement park. My temporal awareness is skewed. I’m dizzy and disoriented. I’ve never been good at math, but I don’t need a high-powered calculator to understand that in cosmic time, humans have existed for less than a millisecond, which means the span of my own life is infinitesimally small, and probably can’t even be measured on this scale.

My spatial awareness also seems to have shifted. I picture myself with my friend walking down the same hallway I’m walking down now as a camera pans out to take in the neighborhood where the campus we’re on is located, then the city, then the country, then the continent, then the earth in one of the hundreds of billions of solar systems in one of the two trillion galaxies in a universe that’s 93 billion light years in diameter. I rest my hand flat against the cool, metal interior of the elevator to get my bearings as we descend to the lobby.

Outside, evening has arrived. Students lounge on blankets: chatting, scrolling, listening to music. Sunlight warms my face. I’m relieved to be outdoors again under a peach-colored sky. How long till all this ends? I wonder, and just like that, the hollow, aching undercurrent I felt before my morning session returns.

My homesick client misses San Francisco. She misses home. Maybe that’s what I feel, too: homesickness. Except this version is anticipatory. I’m homesick for the earth we’re losing before we’ve lost it. Soon—immeasurably soon in cosmic time—humanity will reach a tipping point, and we’ll realize that air, water, clouds, trees, whales, birds, laughter, and boundless possibilities are incalculably rare and precious. Will it be too late?

“Taking a cosmic perspective recalibrates things,” my friend remarks as we pass the wrought-iron gate at the campus’s entrance and make our way back to her parked car. “It’s a bit like forest bathing, isn’t it?”

“Maybe we all need to hang out more with scientists,” I say ruefully.

But on the ride home, my thoughts drift back to my 9 a.m. client and her polite smile. I thought of you and what you said last week, I imagine telling her at our next session. And you know what? I think sadness is the opposite of pointless. I think it’s an underappreciated form of love, and one of the most reliable ways we can figure out what truly matters.

ILLUSTRATION © DZMITRY