Angels and Apes

I haven't blogged for quite some time now, primary because my wife is hugely pregnant, and secondly because writing a scifi story is like catching fish with oily hands. Whenever you finally get one thing straight something else turns on you.
I've come to realize that that's what this blog is mostly about. To straighten my path out, and giving me a broader perspective on what the Frag I'm doing!

I started out with a regular story (an old story I wrote a years ago)- it was a bit messy, and maybe a little more lightheaded than I usually like, but entertaining in it's own right. Now I want the universe the story takes place in to be whole and believeable in it's own right.
So I started collecting everything I knew and could find about space, evolution and life and threw that into the boiling pot. But the more I got into the science part, the wierder the fiktion part became. I had to find out more about means of travel, communication, aliens, future humanity, settlements, living in an ancient universe, and most important: Which solutions I wanted to use in the story! Questions like: Is there a thing like an alien civilization at all? And if so, is it in the story? And are there more than one?  (I decided to go "Yes" on those ones, by the way...)

I like Star Trek, but to me those aliens are rarely truely alien. And that's because Star Trek always are about human interactions, and never aliens. I want the alien to be truely alien and overwhelming. To keep the mysteries mysterious. And the more I thought about it, the harder it got. Because how do you describe something as strange as the unknown and unseen and on top of that make it interact with us, with humans? And wanting it to do so?
To quote Sir Arthur C. Clarke: 

If one considers the millions of years of pre-history, and the rapid technological advancement occurring now, if you apply that to a hypothetical alien race, one can figure the probabilities of how advanced the explorers will find them. The conclusion is that we will find apes or angels, but not men.

I love science - I do. And I find inspiration in it every single day. It has made me see how miraculous our planet must be, just by being here. Where ever you go - There's nowhere like here. It's unique. But there are other places as just wonderfull as this small planet. There has to be. At least that what science and mathematics has tought me.
So I have to walk a very fine line - and I may not succeed at all - of what I think I know there can be and of how my story wants to be presented. Science on one side and space opera on the other.