My youngest son celebrated his golden birthday on the Fourth of July. After the birthday festivities, I decided to watch Independence Day. Afterwards, I realized that almost every depiction of “aliens” I have ever seen or heard of is a projection of our love of science and technology, a sustaining narrative that fuels our inability to change the ways we live in late modernity. There are no Amish aliens. No Wendell Berry-types who fall from the sky and only want to garden and make a small life for themselves. Our “aliens” are what we would be by now if modernity got things right the first time.

Philosopher and social critic Slavoj Žižek has remarked that we can imagine the end of the world but we cannot imagine the end of capitalism. The world whose end I want to contemplate is the world that has been created by modern science and its progeny, modern technology. If, or when, science brings an end to the modern world it has helped to create, is a world after science possible? Can a new world emerge after the quintessentially modern scientific worldview has worn and weathered?