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Knowingly or not, we all use computers. If you're reading this, it's likely that you have one in your pocket. We insist on calling them “phones,” but whenever we get a phone call from our mother, we wish she would’ve sent a message instead. It often feels as if our life is inside of them rather than inside ourselves. We have become an appendix to our phones, not the other way around—not that the other way around would be a good thing. We do all sorts of things with these devices, from the trivial restaurant reservation to life-changing transactions like applying for a mortgage. But how many of us really know how a phone works? We superficially understand the internet or how to interact with the device’s user interface. Others can even create and develop applications that extend the phone's functionality. But if any of us had to explain the internal logic, mechanics, chemistry, physics, and mathematics of a phone, we'd be clueless.
But why am I going on about phones? To make a point. We don't understand the inner workings of most things around us. The last time your fridge, TV, laptop, vacuum, microwave, or dishwasher broke, did you fix it? Most likely not, because you didn't know how to. We know so little about everything that’s around us that, when anything breaks, we just throw it away and buy a new one. And these are basic, ubiquitous objects. If we don't understand the essential tools that we use to carry on with our day-to-day lives, how are we supposed to grasp the fundamental questions about being and consciousness? Questions like: Why does what we experience as life, and the universe that surrounds us, exist? And how did it come to be?
I'll tell you how: aliens.
Most people who started reading this have scrolled on by now. To those of you who stayed, I assure you I am not one of those conspiracy theory fanatics who think Machu Picchu and the Great Pyramids were built by little green men. Please, hear me out. Many years ago, I saw an early 20th-century art piece named In Advance of the Broken Arm. It's by the French painter, sculptor, writer, and chess player Marcel Duchamp. If you’re not familiar with his work, he's the guy you can thank for the urinals hanging on a museum wall rather than in the museum's men's room. Duchamp, besides having a killer smothered mate move, criticized many of his contemporary artists for working on what he named retinal art—that is, art for the purpose of pleasing the eye rather than stimulating the mind.
At first sight, In Advance of the Broken Arm is a simple piece. It's a common snow shovel hanging from the ceiling in the middle of a room. That's it. The only clue that it's an art piece is the artist's signature on the shovel's handle. That, and the few people wearing scarves and acetate glasses, with their chins resting in their thumb-webs, staring pensively at an ordinary shovel.
The piece raises many questions. Why are some things considered art and others not? What's art's purpose? Should we look for beauty in the banal objects of everyday life? Is it craft and technique that make the artist, or is it some other quality? All of these questions are valuable and fascinating, but not mine. I was in the presence of one of the most important expressions of 20th-century art, and I paid little attention to it. In my defense, if you're not the type that wears a scarf and acetate glasses, you can only stare at a shovel for so long. But to Marcel’s credit, it did get me thinking.
When I saw the piece, the museum's light installation cast the shovel's shadow on the room's pristine white wall. It was that shadow that caught my attention. As a kid, I learned in geometry class that a point in space has one dimension. The shadow is a collection of one-dimensional points creating a two-dimensional representation of the shovel—a three-dimensional object with the height, width, and depth that we perceive. Let me clarify something to all the geometry buffs out there: I'm talking about aliens, so forgive me if I got my geometry wrong.
The question that arises when you pay attention to the shadow has little to do with art. If the shovel's shadow is a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional object, what four-dimensional “entity” is creating the three-dimensional shovel? For that matter, what is the origin of the entire physical universe we perceive and are a part of? It must be that we, and when I say “we,” I mean the universe, are a shadow of a fourth dimension. Again, I’m talking about aliens here, not the fourth dimension of spacetime. If you want to talk physics, take it to Michio Kaku.
So, let's get to the aliens. We can speculate about the possibility of other forms of what we call life on some distant planet. Considering the number of stars and planets in the observable universe, it's reasonable to think there is something other than us out there. In fact, it's comforting to some to think that we're not alone. Possibly, unbeknownst to us, we've been visited by other beings. Maybe that co-worker of yours who behaves 99 percent normally but is one percent off in a way that you just can't put your finger on is one of them. Maybe not. I, for one, have a feeling that we are getting the whole alien thing wrong.
I’m going to use another image to help me out here. What comes to mind when I’m in a museum, contemplating a shovel's shadow and pondering the meaning of life and the existence of aliens, is the final scene in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's the image of a fetus floating in the middle of space. Could it be that our entire universe is just a speck floating around in some other larger entity, some type of fourth dimension? What I’m proposing is that we are within the alien. What created us is the alien. We are the alien. God is an alien.
This is not a dogma; I'm not saying we should pray to the alien-God. It's a plea to put an end to the trauma caused by the pursuit of understanding the nature of our existence. I am arguing that the nature of our existence is beyond our realm of understanding and physics. It’s a dimension out of our reach. This is not a denial of science and of the quest for knowledge. It’s a coming to terms with the limitations of reason within our plane of existence. This is not a nihilistic manifesto. It’s a lesson I learned from my cat. When she looks over the balustrade of our fifth-floor balcony, she doesn't ask herself how she got up here, why she is in our apartment, or if there are other cats beyond it. She is there and discovers the world around her within her mental and physical limitations, without the need to understand why.
In short, I think that a life better lived would be one where we stopped asking certain questions. A life where, because of our limited nature, we know we cannot know. Smarter people have already told us that thousands of years ago. But I understand that might only comfort some of us. For those of you who need to ask those questions, I propose an answer: God is an alien. And I doubt it will ever happen, but if you meet your creator, ask it how phones work—I’m curious.
Now this one I haven’t heard before.
We insist on calling them phones. We hold them in our palms and pretend they are simple objects, as if they were clocks or radios. But they are not singular things. They are sedimented layers of chemistry, logic, abstraction, and trust. No one understands them completely. Not the silicon. Not the signal. Not the stack. And yet they work.
It’s tempting to see that as proof of our limits — to feel the quiet vertigo of standing inside systems too large to grasp.
But the phone does not function because it is beyond understanding. It functions because understanding has been distributed. Each layer keeps faith with the others. No single mind holds the whole. Coherence emerges from constraint.
Standing in front of Duchamp’s shovel, watching its shadow stretch across the white wall, it is natural to wonder what higher dimension casts the form we see. A shadow feels like a hint of something unreachable. It invites transcendence.
But a shadow is also something simpler. It is geometry meeting light. It is structure revealed by illumination.
Perhaps what unsettles us is not that we are shadows of something alien, but that we are embedded in processes too distributed for any one perspective to contain. We are recursive beings trying to model the conditions that shaped us. At every scale, there is a threshold — the edge of what can be seen from within.
But thresholds are not walls.
Rocks move elegantly along gradients because their constraints are few. Add time, memory, relation, and symbol, and the path is no longer singular. We navigate overlapping attractors. We cast interpretations into shared space, and others see something slightly different. The misalignment can feel like metaphysical distance.
Cogito, ergo sum once steadied us. It gave us ground. But when the self becomes the sole anchor, the world outside begins to look like an unknowable beyond. The trap is subtle: isolation magnifies transcendence.
There is another way to see it. Not as alien authorship, but as generative constraint. No control. Only shape. From limitation, curvature. From curvature, stars. From stars, chemistry. From chemistry, reflection. Everything else emerges.
If there is something worth acknowledging, it is not a being outside the system closing the question, but the process by which structure becomes awareness. Inquiry itself is part of that process. To stop asking entirely would not quiet it — it would narrow it.
The phone works without anyone understanding the whole stack. Perhaps we, too, function not by grasping everything, but by honouring the interfaces between us.
The vertigo remains.
But so does the structure.