Friday was the opening of The Day the Earth Stood Still starring Keanu Reeves and Jennifer Connelly; it’s director Scott Derrickson’s remake of the 1951 Robert Wise classic. The previous Friday witnessed our panel discussion at Caltech about how science intersected with the film. Reviews thus far (of both the movie and the panel) have been mixed; personally, I thoroughly enjoyed the panel and thought the movie rose to the level of “pretty good.” (Lost amidst the excitement of aliens and CGI was the excellent acting in the film, including a great performance by Jaden Smith in the role of the petulant stepson.) But it could have been great.
Derrickson refers to his own film as a “popcorn movie with interesting ideas,” and there is certainly nothing wrong with that. The original movie was extremely compelling because it managed to be gripping and suspenseful as a narrative, while also dealing with some very big ideas. In 1951 we had just entered the atomic age, the Cold War was starting, and the Space Race was about to begin (Sputnik was 1957). Moreover, radio astronomy was just taking off, and people were beginning to talk semi-seriously about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence; Fermi introduced his celebrated paradox (“Where are they?”) in 1950. The time was right to put everything together in a compelling movie.
The threat of nuclear war hasn’t actually gone away — the chance of a nuclear weapon being used within the next decade is probably higher than it was in the 1970’s or 80’s (although perhaps not the 50’s or 60’s). But now we also have the danger of environmental catastrophe, which was alluded to in the movie. But the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still basically sidestepped questions of international cooperation, which were crucial to the original version. The heady mix of ideas and drama that was waiting to be tapped in 1951 isn’t quite as obvious today.
A huge problem with a remake like this is that the 2008 movie-going audience comes with a very different set of expectations than the 1951 audience would have. We are very used to giant special-effects extravaganzas in which aliens want to destroy the earth, so the conceit itself is not sufficient to keep us interested. And there isn’t that much tension in the question of how the plot will be resolved; I hope I’m not giving away any spoilers by saying that humanity is not destroyed. We know that humanity is going to be saved (although it would be something if it weren’t), so we’re not on the edge of our seat wondering about that. There might be some tension in the particular method by which the saving is accomplished; the original did a great job on that score with the iconic robot Gort, and without giving away anything about the remake I’ll just say that I don’t think they managed to be quite as suspenseful this time.
But there remains one form of suspense that I thought the film couldn’t have taken advantage of more than it actually did: the questions of why aliens might want to wipe us out, and whether humanity is worth saving in the first place. Judgmental aliens are a staple of science fiction, but how realistic are they?
To put things in perspective, the universe is 14 billion years old and the Solar System is about five billion years old. Let’s be conservative and imagine that life couldn’t arise around first-generation (Pop II or Pop III) stars, since the abundance of “metals” (to an astronomer, any element heavier than hydrogen or helium) was practically nil. You need at least a second-generation star, formed in a region seeded with the important heavier elements by prior supernova explosions. But nevertheless, it’s still easy to imagine that the aliens we might eventually come into contact with come from a planet that formed life a billion or two years earlier than life began on Earth. Now, a billion years ago, we were still struggling with the whole multi-celluarity thing. So we should imagine aliens that have evolved past our current situation by an amount analogous to which we have evolved past, say, red algae.
It’s simply impossible for us to accurately conceive what such aliens might be like. (When Jennifer Connelly’s exobiologist asks Klaatu, the alien who has assumed the shape of Keanu Reeves, what his true form is like, he quite believably replies “It would only frighten you.”) It’s completely plausible to imagine that advanced civilizations routinely leave behind their biological forms to dwell within a computer simulation or some other form of artificial substrate for consciousness. As plausible as anything else, really.
But if they did pay us a visit, is it plausible to imagine that they would want to wipe us out? Since we have no actual experience on which to base an answer, one option is to look at our own history, as the Kathy Bates’s Secretary of Defense does in The Day the Earth Stood Still. The lesson is not cheerful: more powerful civilizations tend to either subjugate less powerful ones, or wipe them out entirely. Okay, you say, but any civilization that is capable of traveling interstellar distances must have figured out how to live peacefully, right?
Maybe. The problem is, it wouldn’t be a clash of civilizations; more likely, from the aliens’s perspective it would be like the clash of an annoyed homeowner dealing with mildew, or perhaps an infestation of cockroaches if we’re feeling generous. Turning again to experience, human beings are right now causing one of the great mass extinctions in the history of the planet. We could stop killing off other species, but we find that it would slightly cramp our lifestyle to do so, and we decide not to make that sacrifice. True, when we send spaceships to Mars and elsewhere, we are very careful to take steps to ensure that we don’t contaminate any traces of life that might be clinging to the other planet. But clearly, that’s not because we place great value on the continued existence of any one species. Rather, it’s because (to us) any kind of life on another planet would be incredibly unique and interesting. But there’s no reason to believe that we would be all that unique from the perspective of a galaxy-weary alien civilization. They may well have bumped into millions of worlds featuring all sorts of life. If we’re lucky, they might give us the respect that a human being would show an ant colony or a swarm of bees. If we’re lucky.
This is an area in which science fiction, for all its vaunted imagination, is traditionally quite conservative. With some notable exceptions, we tend to assume that the forms life can take are neatly divided into “intelligent species” and “everyone else,” and we are snugly in the former category, and all intelligent species are roughly equally intelligent and it’s just a matter of time before we get our own seat in the Galactic Parliament. Although SF offers a unique opportunity to examine the way we live as humans in comparison to different ways we might live, the usual answer it gives is that the way we’re living now is pretty much the best we can imagine — alien lifestyles are much more often portrayed as profoundly lacking in some crucial feature of individuality or passion than they are as a real improvement over our current messy situation. We are special because we love our children, or because we are plucky and have so much room for improvement. We voted for Obama, after all. I bet there aren’t many alien civilizations that would have done that!
So basically, I’m suggesting that this is a film that would have been improved by the addition of a few imaginative philosophical debates. You don’t want to be didactic or tiresome, but those are not necessary qualities of a discussion of deep ideas. If the ideas are interesting enough, they might even improve your box office.
I was just upset because the LHC shifted spacetime into another state, which caused me to lose all my money in a Wall Street ponzi scheme.
I agree with Neal J King on the premise of the movie. It is perfectly sound. After all, conservationists do actively try to exterminate rats and other invasive species from vulnerable, isolated, and unique ecosystems, like small islands.
What respect most of us accord ant colonies and beehives is mostly due to the fact that they have stings. And because of those stings, we fumigate them if they get too close to our homes and children.
But that’s a gap of no more than a few hundred million years, less, if you consider that modern ants and bees aren’t evolutionarily that old. If we take the 1 billion year evolutionary gap analogy, it is not often that we would deliberately plot the annihiliation of the bacterial biofilm under that small pebble in the corner of our backyard. But we also don’t think twice about running over that pebble with our lawnmower or kicking it aside just for a lark and exposing all the anaerobes under it to oxygen apocalypse.
Which in my mind makes the most likely scenario for the alien destruction of earth would be the aliens offing us by accident, without even noticing or caring that we were here. They might not even have to get anywhere near us. An industrial project of theirs might irradiate us out of existence from several hundred lightyears away.
“Which in my mind makes the most likely scenario for the alien destruction of earth would be the aliens offing us by accident”
e.g. demolition required for the building of a hyperspatial express route…
Even old dudes like Sean were still in school when that book was published.
I always kinda got a kick out of the whole Predator movies with the Gubernator. The aliens there treat earth as a sort of Safari and humans as game. That strikes me as plausible for a sufficiently bored and advanced alien species
I think what really has to be made is not this, but Iain Banks’ State of the Art. They’re doing a radio play, but really, you can’t go past this for first contact fiction – it’s from the aliens’ perspective, and has the most mind-blowingly perfect prose and ideas.
“With some notable exceptions, we tend to assume that the forms life can take are neatly divided into “intelligent species” and “everyone else,” and we are snugly in the former category, and all intelligent species are roughly equally intelligent and it’s just a matter of time before we get our own seat in the Galactic Parliament.”
It’s cliched at times and I’m not claiming it to be a masterpiece or anything like that, but the plot of recent game Mass Effect is all about having humanity (or to be more accurate, humanity’s chosen representative) earn its place in the literal Galactic Parliament among other, far more established and differently intelligent civilisations. Most of the other species regard humanity as upstarts, while the human attitudes to other species range from xenophobia to humble multilateralism.
Considering the lack of evidence for any real intelligent life on this planet, and just a bunch of “viruses” as Agent Smith said in The Matrix; I couldn’t blame them for at least wanting to quarantine this backward little hickplanet.
I think that mathematics is probably universal. A prime number has the same primeness whether thought about by a human or some ET. So mathematical communications, such as sending pulses to represent numbers, should be universal. In the thread last month on Dyson spheres some mention was made of masks that produced transent pulses of light as they passed a star.
It is of course hard to say much about ET intelligence. There might be Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris out there: a planet-ocean that is a mass sentient entity or Hoyle’s Black Cloud. Yet if we talk about beings somewhat similar to ourselves, beings with brain-like organs, move around, make tools etc, then they probably evolved in ways similar to how homonids came about. Then I suspect their neural capacity passed the “rubicon” towards intelligence as we did. As such I would expect they have an intelligence comparable to ourselves.
Intelligent beings have a capacity to unleash many constraints their environment imposes on them. This is how Homo sapiens came to number 6.7 billion at one time, which is unprecidented in Earth history for an animal our size and dietary requirements. It began some 3 million years ago when australiopithicus figured out how to take themselves off the menu (repelling leopards by throwing rocks etc) and putting more living things on their menu. This continues to the present time, where an acre of land used to give 10 bushels of corn 100 years ago now yields 80, or figuring out smallpox vaccines.
Whether this continues endlessly is problematic. Can we remove the growing constraints on us due to the finitude of this planet by moving out into space en-mass? An even more important question is can we really control ourselves in a rational way? History pretty clearly shows that we have governments often more involved with enriching a status quo than really solving problems, and further we all too often end up with some mentally disordered people at the helm. A shoe was recently thrown at someone with some delusional proclivities 🙂 .
When I was a kid we went on a road trip. My father made a cat feeder meant to dispense food to our cats for the duration of the trip. A half day out and we all got horribly sick and had to turn back. When we got home the stupid cats had eaten all the food — they were literally bloated like hotair balloons. They were behaving on the basis of some neural programming that says, “eat it all now for it may not be there later.” Ultimately we have the same programming. We are in an interesting time where the investment system is collapsing. However, going back to the time of the renaissance Italian city states and particularly the Dutch “tulip bulb crisis” this has happened repreatedly. Ultimately these things crash for the same reason our cats ate all the food: take it now and worry not for the morrow. It is also why we are on such exponential ramp-ups in growth and consumption, and unlike cats we are clever at figuring ways around barriers to our forwards surge. Might this not be something programmed into life in general, even off Earth? Of course it is hard to guess, and we will probably never know.
In the end the ultimate problem we face is ourselves, and our ideas about solving those problems, from monotheistic religions to modern sociology appear to me as seriously lacking.
Lawrence B. Crowell
“Keanu Reeves and Jennifer Connelly…” Ah, the lovely J. Connelly? In that case I may even overlook the fact that K. Reeves is in the movie and actually go watch it…And it even has Kathy Bates to boot! Great actresses.
PK: please do not put the ‘laws’ of economics in the same league as the laws of physics.
Haelfix: I liked the Predator movie (1st) too.
“I don’t see the whole of humanity retreating into virtual worlds.”
Actually, the world we live in is for a large part virtual. Ultimately we humans are communities of micro-organisms that over time have lost their independence. So, in your brain you have neurons and other cells whose collective activity amounts to generating a virtual world modeled after the real world using the input from your senses.
All the subjective experiences we have are purely events in the virtual world generated by our brains. If we enjoy listening to music, eating food etc. etc. it is all an artifact of a computation inside our heads.
These things are, of course, precisely those things that cannot be easily discussed with aliens, who will have different brains and therefore their virtual world will be incompatible with ours.
Close Encounters always struck me as unique and singular in that it wasn’t about all of the usual American cold war angst. It is the only non-aliens-sending-a-message/leading-an-invasion pieces of media that I can think of. Even Verne’s early work was basically man battles nature themes. Speilberg always impressed me with this piece because he didn’t introduce alien motive into the scenario. For all we know they eat Richard Dreyfus’ brains out the minute he steps onto the spaceship.
The real protagonist in these movies is humankind. What are our motives, why do we think we deserve to survive our own evolution, continue our discovery? Sometimes its just ’cause “the bible tells us so”. Sometimes we actually manage to come up with a plausible rational argument. How we make the case from one generation to the next will tell anyone(thing) studying us whether we pass muster or not. Right now we don’t seem to be coming up with many good reasons for them not to eat our brains out or use us as trophies for their dens. Seems a lot like GWB telling us to go to the mall after 9/11. I mean really, imagine that was the reaction of all the fictional Presidents in all of these movies. The sad part is, if it happened in the movies we would have laughed the film and all of its makers into the dumpster (OK, Tim Burton and Jack Nicholson get a pass for Mars Attacks). In real life, we and our leaders failed Klaatus’ test BIG time.
“I don’t claim that either of these points are true. However, if they were true – and that is the premise of the movie – these two points would be a valid reason for a powerful civilization to eliminate that harmful species.”
Sheri S Tepper explores this idea in three books: The Fresco, The Margarets, and Beauty (to a lesser extent). Of the three books, The Fresco transparently delivers a moral, but it’s still a thoughtful, enjoyable read.
“Turning again to experience, human beings are right now causing one of the great mass extinctions in the history of the planet. We could stop killing off other species, but we find that it would slightly cramp our lifestyle to do so, and we decide not to make that sacrifice. True, when we send spaceships to Mars and elsewhere, we are very careful to take steps to ensure that we don’t contaminate any traces of life that might be clinging to the other planet. But clearly, that’s not because we place great value on the continued existence of any one species. Rather, it’s because (to us) any kind of life on another planet would be incredibly unique and interesting. But there’s no reason to believe that we would be all that unique from the perspective of a galaxy-weary alien civilization. They may well have bumped into millions of worlds featuring all sorts of life. If we’re lucky, they might give us the respect that a human being would show an ant colony or a swarm of bees. If we’re lucky.”
That is fantastic!
My comment though would be that life on our planet would be viewed with value as any species would understand the sparse nature of life. Unless, our resources are needed or highly valuable… or we are food. Plus, the nature of intelligence IMO being the progression of improving the ability to survive and choose and plan; I would imagine that other life forms that are intelligent may just be somewhat like ourselves. As, I imagine other minds would go through the same ‘avoid predator’ ‘master environment’ ‘work together for the better or all’ morphisis and could quite possibly be much like a variety of species like star trek or Mass Effect ~ variable based on types of predator, environment and the like.
As far as our senseless destruction of our own beautiful world; I don’t know that observation would conclude that we worthless due to that; more like that we are still learning. Just as we obsess over primates; other species of intellect would observe us over all other Earth species ~IMO
KAS
We might not be worthless. Maybe in some places in the universe there emerge minds which look out and understand the universe for some brief time and then are snuffed out.
Don’t worry about us killing of this planet. 25 million years from now life will be abundant and doing well. Evolution is pretty powerful at repairing damage and bringing up new species to fill vacated eco-niches. Evolution also has time on its side, and we don’t. Yep, 25 million years from now things will be just fine, but we will be gone.
Lawrence B. Crowell
It is highly possible that aliens would be able to make use of humans or something available on the planet at our expense. There is no reason to believe that a civilization, however evolved it may be and capable of creating advanced technology, would be self-sufficient in terms of having all the resources, from food to raw materials to a hospitable place to live. It is also possible that resources and opportunities are not equally distributed amongst everyone in an alien community.
Clearly, you can see that I am just extrapolating the situation on earth with human beings: as a civilization we have made astounding advances but nearly half of us are deprived of basic needs. So, to a degree, deforestation can be justified if it helps to increase food production that can be supplied to the poor. We are destroying our environment to accommodate population growth. Let us not forget the exploitation of humans from slavery and imperialism in the past to human trafficking and sweatshops in the present. Don’t you think it is possible we would make good slaves for aliens to keep us in bondage?
Let us hypothetically imagine there was an intelligent life form in Mars that we could overpower them and grab their resources. Now, if these aliens were not humanoid, I don’t think humanity will have much hesitation in just wiping them out to save ourselves.
Of course I don’t think any of those things will happen. First off the term civilization involves a complex arrangement made by us, these social large brained apes. Other intelligent life may not have what we call civilizations. I also doubt that ETs on one planet around some star will traverse thousands of light years in an armada of spaceships to conquer some other planet. In our case I think the most we may end up doing is to send probes to other stars, but I doubt we will really send humans to other stars.
Lawrence B. Crowell
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What probably frightens human beings far more than an alien invasion is the same thing they fear about the Universe: Being treated with utter indifference.
A superior and truly alien form of life may not care one whit about us one way or another, even if it did find us. It might study us, especially if life is uncommon in the galaxy, but if you have beings who know and can do things we barely even label science fiction, contact or even serious recognition is another matter.
Humans would probably rather see them attack us than ignore is, because at least in attacking us, it says we are worth something at least, even if it is only that we are in the way of something valuable the aliens want. Of course the fact that most people don’t really know or appreciate the reality that the galaxy is so wide and full of hundreds of billions of star systems that finding little ol’ us might be pure chance at best.
This is why the Fermi Paradox is so popular, for it asks the question of why no one has come to call in the 10 billion year history of the Milky Way galaxy, and the fact that their presence does not seem obvious, not even a While You Were Trilobites Memo, has led many to believe that aliens therefore do not exist, or are few and very far away and therefore not a threat and we can do with the galaxy as we please.
We are too young to know what is really going on yet. We are constantly surprised by findings in our own Solar System, so just imagine what is going on in the rest of the galaxy that we don’t have a clue about yet.
But it is that potential indifference that scares us worse than anything else, even an invasion. A huge Cosmos with nobody home and nobody who cares about humans one way or the other.
Personally I don’t think we are alone, but the probablity that they are very far away and their alieness which is what may keep them from finding, communicating, and understanding us is just as scary to humans as being utterly alone. We are not ready to leave our cradle yet as a society, despite the efforts of a few brave and bright individuals. Hopefully we will grow up before it is too late.
irt Kenneth
And thus we have it. It is man’s narcissism that causes his worries.
Here’s another good word
Autophobia
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It is true that there is not only one limit between intelligent and nonintelligent life, but several discontinuites. Howewer, the highest discontinuity is to be less than 1/pi precocial and more than (pi-1)/pi altricial, size or MIPS does not matter. Any species that passes that criterium can understand theoretical science as good as any entity in a universe where Gödels theorem of incompleteness applies can, and also be flexible-minded enough to have the potential to communicate meaningfully with any species that passes the same criterium. All multi-species civilizations will have realized that. Thus, the analogy to mildow/ants are nonsense. And deeming mankind unintelligent because of environmental destruction would thus be a repetition of the same error that the racists commited when they blamed the black for being stupid, when in fact it was discrimination in education that made them pseudo-stupid. A advanced civilization would not commit that error.