Turnstile, Blood Orange, BadBadNotGood Alien Love Call (2023)
“The starry heaven, though it occurs so very frequently to our view, never fails to excite an idea of grandeur.”
In his work A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), philosopher Edmund Burke examines the nature of the sublime. Vastness and infinity are among the characteristics of the sublime, with Burke arguing that the sublime is an immediate feeling, free from reason, and that it challenges the instinct for self-preservation.
So, no wonder that whenever I start thinking about the universe as a whole, I feel a bit sick to my stomach. That’s why I usually choose to blindly accept the fact that we live on a planet in a galaxy (🤯), rather than contemplating the sheer scale of it all.
Then I hear a song like “Alien Love Call” by Turnstile, featuring Blood Orange and BadBadNotGood and the hardcore-punk-meets-funky-soul-tune pulls me back into the mysteries of the cosmos. Their rhetorical question, “Can’t be the only one,” is backed by science: The Fermi-Paradox postulates that given the billions of stars in the galaxy and countless planets likely capable of supporting life, there should be no shortage of advanced civilizations in the universe. So, why haven’t we encountered not even a trace of extraterrestrial life? Or, as physicist Enrico Fermi put it: “Where is everybody?”
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