“Yes, peculiar. And so Charles says, I assure you, madam, these birds are all part of the same species. They differ only in that they were found on different islands in the Galapagos.”
With that, she stops.
That’s it?
That’s all?
I hunch my shoulders slightly, willing her on, but she doesn’t say anything else. It’s as though there’s nothing more to be said.
“And?” I ask.
“That was all Charles needed,” she says. “Just a gentle nudge to see what lay before him all along. His eyes lit up. All the pieces fell together from there. We talked for hours about barnacles and earthworms, and before long he’s telling us about how he thinks life branches out imperceptibly over countless generations from a common ancestor.
“Darwin may have sailed to the Galapagos and marveled at the wonders of Nature on those remote islands, but he discovered Natural Selection in his own backyard, looking at ants and weeds, ducks and pigeons. It was only in retrospect that he realized how important those finches were.
“Once we saw he was on track, we stepped back into the shadows and watched as history unfolded.”
“Wow,” I say. “That’s pretty cool.”
My nose is running with the cold. I sniff and wipe it with the back of my hand, hoping I’m not grossing her out.
“Hey, what about Einstein? Did you meet him as well?”
“Oh, yes,” she says. “He was so kind, even as a young man. Michelson and Morley performed an experiment for us in the late 1880s, measuring the speed of light in different directions. We knew what the outcome would be, of course, but it left them scratching their heads for a couple of decades. You see, light always moves at the same speed regardless.
“Light doesn’t make sense. No matter how fast you go, you can never get any closer to the speed of light than you are right now, sitting here on a park bench. Sure, you might race away from Earth at close to the speed of light, but regardless of where you are or how fast you’re going, the light around you always wins the race by exactly the same margin.”
I can’t even pretend to understand what she’s describing, but Sharon’s excited by the concept. To me, her words sound mystical, almost magical, even though I know they’re not.
“Do you know what made Einstein great?”
“No,” I say, feeling dwarfed by the discussion.
“That he accepted reality. Everyone else looked to explain away the results. Not Einstein. If the theory didn’t fit the evidence, then he had to find something that would. Once we saw that, we stepped back. We watched and kept him safe, but he did all the hard work. What a wonderful man.”
I’m speechless.
Sharon asks, “If you had to pick one thing in the last thousand years that has had the most profound impact on your species, what would it be?”
I want to say, “I don’t know,” but I have to show Sharon more respect than that, and not take the easy way out. She’s an alien. She’s from the other side of somewhere. I don’t know quite where. The stars? The galaxy? The universe? It is an astonishing privilege to sit here with her talking about human history—my history. I have to come up with a meaningful answer.
“The most profound change in a thousand years?” I ask, looking deep into her eyes. She smiles warmly, sitting back a little and burying her hands into her jacket pockets. She’s genuinely interested in my perspective.
“Is there just one thing?” I ask, my mind rushing to the various possibilities. “I mean, there’s been so many things.
“Galileo pointing a telescope into the night sky… Ah, vaccines. They’ve saved hundreds of millions of lives… The advent of science as a discipline, allowing us to combat superstition… Writing. No, reading becoming commonplace… The invention of the printing press—that had a huge impact on our species… Or the abolition of slavery. The industrial revolution.”
“Pick one,” she says, being patient with me. It might be cold, but I could melt under her warm gaze.
“Okay,” I say. “The microscope. Without it, we’d have no idea about microbes and the diseases that plague our bodies. It’s an invention that spawned the entire medical field as we know it today.”
She nods thoughtfully.
“But it’s not what you were thinking of, was it?”
“No,” she replies with tenderness.
“So what is it?” I ask.
“Ah,” she says, radiating with enthusiasm. “Not an it. Not a thing, but a concept. An idea.”
Sharon pauses, perhaps to see if I’m going to come up with the answer on my own, or simply to give her own answer more weight.
“Equality.”
“Equality?” I say, genuinely surprised. “Really?”
If anything, I’m a little disappointed by that answer. I don’t get it. Perhaps I’m too close to humanity to see clearly, but equality is a buzzword doing the rounds on TV.
“It’s an idea more than a thousand years in the making,” she says. “The idea that each person counts for one and only one.
“Throughout your history, kings and queens ruled with an iron grip, but their edicts were arbitrary and whimsical, rarely handed down justly. Princes demanded equality before the law, then landowners, then the common man, then slaves, and finally, women.”
She might as well hit me over the head with a baseball bat. I couldn’t be more stunned.
“Equality is the quiet enabler,” she says. “Think about how remarkable these times are. Up until the start of the last century, half of the adult population had no say in the affairs of their own lives.”
“Women?” I say, not having thought about it before. “Women were the last ones to get the vote?”
Sharon nods.“In America. In some countries, the color of your skin barred you from voting. Equality is a catalyst for genuine change.”
I feel somewhat ashamed that for a species that’s been in existence for hundreds of thousands of years, that’s been civilized for at least ten thousand years, it’s only in the last hundred years we’ve actually lived up to our ideals—and even then, only barely.
“I guess I just always assumed… And it makes a big difference, huh?”
“Giving 100% of your adult population the freedom to choose their government is significantly better than keeping it to 49%,” she says. “And yet, even though this principle has been established by law, it has still taken over a century for minorities and women to really come into their own as equals. And there’s still work to be done.
“It’s easy to see the sensational. The advent of nuclear power. Neil Armstrong walking on the Moon. Jet planes and computers leading the charge of change. But it’s the small things, those that seem insignificant, that are often the most meaningful and lasting.”
I’m staring into the eyes of a woman, and yet I’m not. I have to remind myself that behind these beautiful brown pupils lies the mind of an entirely alien creature from some other world. If I could see her true form, she would in no way resemble either a man or woman. In less than a day, she’s torn apart my preconceptions about women. From the dance of the soap suds to visiting young Sharon’s grave, and now hearing her talk about equality, I’m seeing humanity through alien eyes.
I splutter, saying, “And you’ve seen all this, the change we’ve been through?”
“Most of it,” she says.
“What about Hitler?” I ask, knowing I’m focusing on the sensational, but I have to know. “Why didn’t you guys kill him? You could have, right?”
“Yes, we could have vaporized him from a low Earth orbit, but what good would that have done?”