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When we contemplate our first
meetings with alien civilizations we tend to fear they will be hostile,
hope that will be benevolent, and guess they will be a mixture of both just like
our own civilizations often are. But what if turns out they aren’t so much benevolent or hostile
as just really insufferable and irritating?
Welcome back to Science & Futurism with
Isaac Arthur for another mid-month Scifi Sundays episode, where we examine popular
notions from science fiction and ask about how realistic they are, and this month we’ll be
returning to our Alien Civilization series for a look at alien civilization or strategies that
are presumably meant to be profound or clever, but on inspection are stupid or annoying. This
summer is also the 25th anniversary of the Alien scifi Blockbuster Film Independence
Day, which while an enjoyable film, is full of this sort of behavior so I thought
we’d give it a bit of extra attention today.
That film came out in the mid-90s and the
preceding decade had been big on alien conspiracies and ancient aliens, indeed that
film’s director Roland Emmerich’s previous film had been Stargate, the founding film of the
Stargate Franchise which focuses a lot on ancient aliens. It was also when crop circles were a
big thing and folks thought this or that big circle or pattern in a field indicated a UFO
had landed or carved a message. My longtime reaction and sentiment to that was to wonder what
sort of mindset would do that and the trickster or social malcontent came to mind. Those folks
whose humor in type or execution is misaligned so that they think they’re very funny but mostly
make the rest of us grit our teeth and try not to throttle them. People who are often nice
enough but fundamentally just very annoying.
That’s what always came to mind for me with crop
circles, I just pictured some alien trying to make a profound or humorous point without realizing
how inconvenient and unnecessary their medium was. Let me go knock some corn over as opposed
to just burning the signs into the ground with my overpowered anti-meteor and collision
lasers or just transmitting it as a pattern on the very active terrestrial radio stations. I
mean if the objective is secrecy or subtlety, writing your name or message or ship footprint
100 meters wide in some actively tended field is a pretty darned inept method at doing that.
Various science fiction satire works, most memorably the Hitchhiker’s Guide to Galaxy,
have played around with the idea that the alien sightings and monuments are genuine but
left as a prank. That the flying saucers, abductions, crop circles, and so on were the work
of galactic pranksters or bored alien teenagers.
Fundamentally I suppose I mean “Annoying” for
this episode to be annoying to us as an audience, especially for genre-savvy scifi veterans who
know what a red shirt is, who Han shot first, why blowing up a giant mothership, be it
hanging over Earth or in Orbit of Endor is likely to cause mass extinction on the planet
below, not celebrations, and who often wonder why evil galactic empires with countless planets
under their control only ever seem to be able to summon armies of a few hundred who seem to be
armed with weapons no deadlier than modern ones.
Now of course this series, Alien Civilizations,
is meant to be rather tongue-in-cheek, but at the same time we are trying to contemplate
how realistic these scenarios are to fine tune what the real scenario out in the Universe is,
since we have so little information on what aliens are actually like or if they even exist. We can
examine a notion like being abducted and probed on an alien ship, and ask how realistic it is that
an alien should need to do this, but what we are often doing instead isn’t saying if they would
or could, but if they are, why they might do so.
I’m generally known as an extreme
skeptic on alien visitations to Earth, though principally because I don’t think there’s
any alien civilizations in our own galaxy. Down the years I’ve gotten to hear from lots of folks
who have had sightings or abduction experience or been investigators on such incidents, and I’m not
really skeptical about the witnesses themselves. Doubtless some are dishonest or confused or
attention seekers but most are honest witnesses. I just don’t think they’re accurate and not
because I think aliens wouldn’t visit Earth. Quite to the contrary, I’d find it nearly
unbelievable that they wouldn’t visit Earth. It's that I tend to find the ways they
allegedly do so don’t make sense.
For any given crime there’s motives, means, and
opportunity, and vandalizing someone’s field or abducting them is a crime, whether it's done by
a prankster or an alien or an alien prankster, but motive and means and opportunity apply to
most actions, not just crimes. This is how we try to look at any given alien sighting or popular
scifi alien trope, not by asking so much if it is true or likely, as what might make it likely.
As an example, folks will sometimes suggest Aliens abduct us for DNA samples, but if
that’s all they wanted, at this point it would be a lot more covert and productive to rob
a vending machine or mailbox to pull DNA samples off all the coins or letters in them. So that
option doesn’t fit. That doesn’t mean there are no motives to abduct humans, hardly I can
think of dozens, but often on examination these don’t work out too well either with our
common assumptions of what they might want.
As another example, you might abduct folks to scan
their brains and need them conscious for that, since you want to study those neurons firing
at various stimuli. You also might very limited options for erasing or clouding memories
of you performing this experiment on them, given that the ability to cleanly wipe
a memory without flaw or occasional failure would imply a very sophisticated
knowledge of our brain which presumably you would not yet have if you were
abducting folks to study their brains. You rarely bother expending vast effort
studying something you have already mastered.
They probably would be able to disrupt or obscure
short term memory after even fairly limited study, there are some techniques that can
seriously screw with short term memory, many of which are easier if you have certain
high-tech but non-human specific tools like gamma knives, where you could just be
recording which neurons fired with whatever you were doing and torch the ones in the memory
areas that you saw activate during your session.
Such being the case it's entirely plausible
you would need to have abducted tons of people and some of them came away with partial
recollection of the event. The thing is if that was your specific goal, you probably started
with corpses, they’re in plentiful supply and we do conveniently preserve and store them
where grave robbing wouldn’t be too hard. You can get a lot from cutting into those and
electrically stimulating them, and get plenty more by just downloading our own internet-available
records of MRI and neurology in general.
Pre-internet, pre-MRI, this particular
abduction theory made a bit more sense, but in a more modern context we would
assume they did as I just suggested, accessing our available studies of it, doing
some graverobbing, and then and only then started abducting real live folks to refine that beyond
what our equipment permitted. Which is plausible enough but folks are often reported as abducted
from their bedroom or vehicle. Both of those would be pretty ideal places to hide passive
but impressive brain scanners, or even active but non-invasive ones, you could probably even
steal power from the available supply in the car or bedroom to run your device and transmitter.
Between watching the TV and watching the road, either is going to provide nearly every common
human stimuli and you can be recording what those were too. There may be some specific stimuli you
would still need to abduct and expose someone to, as being too obscure or bizarre
to expect normal life to provide, but you could wait on those till you mastered
the human brain and erasing short term memories.
Keep in mind at this point this wouldn’t be
some fleeting distorted memory of the event that was warped by drugs, they’d probably could
have recorded every neuron firing during that abduction then precisely removed them, and they
probably would have left a chip into monitor you for signs of memory or reactions later
on, that’s what I’d do anyway if I were in their shoes or whatever passes for footwear or its
equivalent for aliens with no discernible feet.
An obvious rebuttal might be that they genuinely
just don’t care if they leave memories, but the implicit reason there is that they are unethical
not ignorant or indifferent to the problem of it, and such being the case, the easiest way to keep
an abductee from spilling the beans if you want them not to, is to kill them. Alternatively, I
mentioned pranksters as an option, and that one fits pretty well in many ways because its easy
to believe a small and unorganized minority of some bigger civilization occasionally showed up
on planets and played those sorts of hijinks. They know what will generally be viewed as
annoying or too small of crime for their own authorities to get involved, wrecking fields and
scaring some folks might not be worth the trouble to intervene, so they limit themselves to that.
If we’re assuming small and unorganized miscreants as an option, it is probably worth noting
that at least some alien abduction cases are thought to be confused memories of some
more mundane if traumatic or criminal event and that if we’re assuming rogue elements
of an alien civilization are in play, that they can be just as capable of doing
such things. In a potential population pool of trillions upon trillions in even the most
modest interstellar empire, you are going to have a lot of xenophiles or twisted criminals unless
they are much better at detection and treatment of such behavior than we are. Of course, key
thing there, they probably are better at that.
There’s also sustainability. A race of aliens
whose brain doesn’t even use the same chemistry as ours might need a long while to adapt to our
brains or our biology or culture in general, but you should expect the patterns and reasons
for sighting or abductions to change over time. They complete the mission, or learn what
they need, or the pranks get old and stale. With over half a century of sightings, we can
say realistically they aren’t gathering human DNA anymore if they ever were. They would have
all they needed by now. On the other hand one could easily imagine them trying to get a full
catalog of every species on Earth, in the many millions of them, especially the endangered ones
which would be hardest to find and harvest. That might easily provide thousands of ships thousands
of flights, only a handful of which ever got spotted due to some error of stealth systems.
Its common to rebut sighting by pointing out that a civilization capable of building ships able
to cross hundred of trillions of kilometers of space safely shouldn’t be having them crash
on Earth, but realistically an atmosphere and gravity well would tend to be where a ship
would have maintenance issues cropping up, plus we tend to assume Murphy’s Law
still applies to high-tech civilizations. It certainly hasn’t stopped applying to us, our
stuff breaks all the time and it's not hard to imagine some “Save the Earth Species” group, might
be poorly funded and working with very secondhand equipment bought at auction that needs to stop for
repairs more often than it needs to stop for fuel. If you’re running thousands of missions,
having only a few get spotted and only kinda-sorta would be very impressive.
There’s also a tacit assumption about them getting spotted that they would go into panic mode
if we did, and in case like this is might just be a policy to ‘avoid getting spotted, don’t stop and
chat, don’t interfere’ that everybody agrees to but not something they get fired or prosecuted
or vaporized for breaking on accident.
This is what it comes down to though,
some civilization shows up here and we observe a behavior and we try to figure out
why they would be doing it, or alternatively, someone suggests a behavior or motive
and we ask if it makes any sense.
In our regular episode for the week back on
Thursday we looked at Stellar Strip Mining, and those aliens in the Independence Day film
apparently went in for that too, traveling from system to system, clearing it out of what
they wanted, then moving on to a new one as the supply ran out. This seems a weird thing since you
have got to carry all that mass around with you, which is the hardest part of space travel, and
for all that time, which is the hardest part of interstellar space travel. That time element tends
to imply you are actually very good at resource utilization and recycling since you’re spending
decades in between solar systems. Efficient mass and resource use should be your civilizations
top priorities for research and development.
The ship in that film, the original, is plain
huge, even by the standards of this channel where we tend not to even deem something on the
small side of being a megastructure if it's not bigger than a mountain. Nonetheless it was tiny in
size compared to a planet and even tinier in terms of mass. The film implies and the Independence
Day wiki confirms that the evil alien race here, the Harvesters, harvest whole
planets to refuel their ships.
That same wiki entry starts off by describing
them as “a race of highly intelligent and incredibly technologically advanced hive-mind
extraterrestrial beings. They are a threat of universal proportions that seeks to harvest and
destroy planets to refuel their ships, to grow, and to perfect their technology at the expense
of driving indigenous races to extinction.”
I’d really take issue with that “Highly
Intelligent and Incredibly Technologically Advanced” part, especially given how easily their
system gets hacked by humans in the original film and their unshielded ships are so easily shot
down by our jet fighters. The implication there is that the aliens are so stupid they
can’t even properly engineer a spaceship or space habitat or invest any real effort in
learning how to properly harvest or utilize resources. There’s evil, ruthless, and greedy,
and then there’s just dumb, see our episode Stellar Strip Mining for how to do it right.
Anyway I enjoyed the original film but lots of bad science and plot holes there, the
aliens are shown to be amazingly strong yet weirdly and stupidly fragile, so that
they seem more annoying than terrifying.
That’s true of a lot of big-bads in science
fiction, and particularly ones like the Daleks from Doctor Who or the Borg from Star Trek who
undergo what’s known as “Villain Decay”, which is when an enemy that’s initially frightening in a
story slowly seems weaker and often comedic after multiple encounters. Part of this is from the
heroes having to beat them over and over again, you can’t really describe your villain
as nigh-invincible and have that stick after they got ‘vinced’ a bunch of times, no
matter how lucky or contrived the victory was.
The other part though is that the more sequels
something has, the more depth and explanation we get of the bad guy, and the more they start
seeming not to make sense. This is also often true of nominal space fairies or ancient
precursors who we often see in a franchise as super-powerful and old and benevolent but who
“Don’t get involved” except for when they do. The more we learn of them, the less they often
seem like wise elders, and often their motives seem frankly stupid, perverse, annoying,
or downright evil. The Stargate franchise, especially in later series, tended to call
that out more often, having introduced Earth and its heroes to lots of kind and wise alien
races who sympathized with Earth’s plight of being attacked by aliens but were light on
real assistance and heavy on platitudes.
Stargate’s heavy on the big-bad aliens with no
particularly logical reason for their behavior and fairly irritating villainous plans too. I
love that franchise and rank it as even better than the greats like Star Trek and Star Wars, but
the original big bad is an alien species that uses humans as hosts, they’re a type of parasite,
and as slaves and soldiers and worshippers too. The worship only feeds their ego, which appears
to be insatiable, and they are demonstrably in possession of advanced automation and
science, like cloning and robotics, so why they have this relation with humans is
unclear. Later villains shown are the Ori, who are essentially all powerful but like being worshipped
and apparently feed off it, and the Wraith, who feed on human lifeforce energy. They also have
advanced technology which should include cloning.
Space vampires are a trope that is nearly
as overused as regular old vampires. We don’t have life force energy you can suck
out, unless you mean stuff like Protein or Fat or Adenosine Triphosphate, all of which are
more easily available through non-human sources. If we’re talking about feeding on the human soul
– which is definitely not what the Wraith do but is implied to be what the Ori are doing – then
this is fine from a story angle, it's simply taken for granted a soul exists which science
doesn’t have any commentary on for or against. So it works for scifi or sci-fantasy but isn’t a
good one for extrapolation to contemplating actual real alien civilizations and their behavior or
motives. Whether or not souls exists, it would seem a bit of jump to assume some alien race fed
on them and was capable of feeding on human ones. Developing a taste for aliens from
another planet would seem a peculiar path for evolution on a planet to take.
However farming humans is a popular trope in scifi, and a great story but pretty much always a
bad execution in terms of plot holes, like in the Matrix where they use human as an actual source
of electrical power. If you are going to farm humans for their souls, then presumably you want
to maximize humans, so you’d probably be building them a dyson sphere or colonizing hundreds
of planets to plant them on, not blowing up the one they live on, its bad animal husbandry.
You would also presumably be wanting to maximize whatever the nutritional value or taste was that
humans had, which if we’re assuming human better than animal would tend to imply options like
smarter tasted better or more life experience did. Harvesting humans for their memories seems
plausible – indeed it's not a bad reason to create and run a simulated Universe with them in it,
but this probably would not be destructive. You just sneak a chip into their heads that
records and transmits their lives, it need not even necessarily be all that sinister.
Which might make for a very irritating afterlife. You show up at the nominal pearly gates and some
alien St. Peter walks up with a clipboard saying “This afterlife sponsored by the Aldeberan
Realistic Games & Holograms Corporation, please sign this waiver for recording your
life and uploading your mind to enter.”
Certainly annoying but better than finding
out they feed on pain and nightmares and find folks who lived happy and satisfying
lives prior to that made for the best meals. Again we can derive possible motives for
aliens from an apparent observed behavior or hypothesize motives for aliens for a story
but often on reflection we can figure out a much better way to achieve that goal than what was
suggested in a story or apparently observed.
One that comes to mind is the Borg from Star
Trek, famous for their introductory message on their phone calls, “We are the Borg… You
will be assimilated… Resistance is Futile.”
Then they attack and blow stuff up and abduct
folks and stick clunky hardware on them. They’re terrifying in that they
are mysterious, cold, implacable, and unstoppable. They have no pity for your
pleas, because not only do they not care, but they think you should regard them as
doing you a favor for assimilating you. Great villains, especially when written
right, which sadly was often not the case..
Pragmatically you would expect such a
civilization might tend to follow a path of least resistance though, and convert people
with better public relations. Same thing for the evil parasites in Stargate, you show up with
high technology and offering folks a better life, having some converts talking about how awesome
it is – even if they’re brainwashed by the alien puppeteer –and how its strictly voluntary. This is
going to get you plenty of converts, and you just exercise patience until once you’ve got your
numbers up. Aliens and Artificial intelligences should been shown as inhuman, makes for good
stories and better realism, but should not be assumed to be stupid. They may be inhuman in
thought, but they should be smart enough to know the value of understanding how humans think and
having the ability to ape it or manipulate it.
This then, is a key take away for more serious
contemplation of encountering aliens or some AI we might make, or some alien AI.
They may not be human, and we can’t assume they will have human motivations
and behaviors, but we should anticipate they would be smart enough to see the value in
understanding human motivations and behaviors.
In that regard, while an Alien civilization
might opt to simply brute force overwhelm us, and probably could, we should probably not
assume that they would. That instead they would opt for the slow and patient strategies,
given that they probably have time to spare, and that the alien is more likely to invade
holding gifts than guns, offering friendship and smiles rather than threats of annihilation.
So this will wrap us up for another scifi Sunday but we’re going to be having an extended edition
of the episode over on Nebula, where we’re going to a lighting round on 10 of the best known alien
invaders of fiction and what was wrong, stupid, or annoying about their motives and methods, and
we’ll try to briefly explore those alien minds. And if you want to explore some alien
worlds, our sponsor, Curiositystream, has a great episode of Space Phenomena on Alien
Planets that explores what some leading minds are contemplating for strange environments and the
stranger life forms that might arise on them.
If you’d like to see that extended edition of
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Now you can subscribe to Nebula all by itself
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So we’re done for today but not for the week,
and this Thursday we will be discussing whether we should go to Mars now or return to the Moon
and establish a base there first. The Thursday after that we will jump into the distant future -
or maybe not too distant future - to look at the End of Earth. Two weeks from now we will have our
Monthly Livestream Q&A, don’t forget to join us then to get your questions answered. Also if you
missed our most recent episode, last Thursday’s Strip Mining the Galaxy, you can still check that
out, and it’s sequel, the Galactic Laboratory, will finish us out for July, on the 29th.
If you want alerts when those and other episodes come out, make sure to subscribe to the channel,
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Until next time, thanks for
watching, and have a great week!
