A tesseractal would see the three-dimensional world clearly but not be perceived entirely by its inhabitants. As with Edwin Abbott Abbott's A Square in "Flatland," whose two-dimensional mind is blown by a close encounter of the spherical kind.
I'm explaining this to a friend who asked me over lunch if I believed in extraterrestrials. He was making indignant noises over "billions of dollars" being spent on SETI, the club for radio astronomy nerds who decipher space noise. And why would "they" do this when there are already extraterrestrials right here, he said conspiratorially.
I'm guessing "they" is the government. The government of the United States. The one made up of some lawyers, the occasional car salesman, a doctor or two, a few businessfolk and a lot of spoiled rich dudes who pretty much repeat what their 24-year-old aides tell them to say. These are the people covering up the existence of alien life forms walking among us here on Earth.
He is giving "they" way too much credit.
Even cursory observation suggests that bungled coincidences outnumber actual conspiracies by a ratio of about 1,000:1. Most actual conspiracies are really a string of small, coincidental farces. Conspiracies reside primarily within people's hindsight, but we love them.
My lunch date is a guy who will say anything in a confrontational way just to see what he gets back. He just finished telling me how he intentionally incensed the wife of a mutual friend by ripping women of a "certain age" just within earshot of her. She takes herself too seriously. Instead of shooting him down with a single Viagra crack, she came unglued.
He said she was scary.
I said don't sleep. Ever.
As for extraterrestrials, I told him that few things, for me, were matters of "belief," but rather of deduction. And because we keep receiving and decoding new information throughout our lifetimes, deduction is a continuing versus a conclusive process. For me—a single unit of a known species of 7 billion living on a tiny wet clod in the solar system, itself a miniscule dust spec in the galaxy, itself a infinitesimally small dust bunny in the universe, itself one of an infinite number—to presume I can achieve conclusive knowledge of anything other than my own experience and maybe not even that seems not merely the height of hubris but also insanity.
But he really wanted to go there. I searched his features. He was kidding but he was not. He certainly didn't want to be dismissed as a wackjob, and I knew if he was, he'd persist until I said anything just to get him to shut up.
Him: "You don't seem to feel very strongly about aliens walking around right here."
Me, looking directly at him: "Not at all. All people seem oddly alien to me."
It never occurred to him that he might be A Square, so I told him about it. Between dimensional and string theories, it seems more logical than alarming that other sentient things we cannot perceive of are walking around us. Why not? People talk about experiences with angels and ghosts all the time. Ever have that experience where it seems like you should have just had a car wreck but the vehicles seemed to kind of pass through one another? Me, too. Perfectly sober. Who's to say?
Our propensity to vilify everything we don't understand is more curious to me than those mysteries themselves. It's one thing when there's evidence of malfeasance; another when there's none. There seems to be more malfeasance in human nature than in nature itself. Nature is one indifferent mistress. Humanity it scared of its shadows.
It's always a good idea to question one's way of seeing the world as much as questioning what one does or does not see in it.
Here's an alien kitty:
