Matt Gurney: Let’s talk about aliens
Matt Gurney: Let’s talk about aliens
Too many of our assumptions about what other forms of life could be like are rooted in our lousy imaginations
By: Matt Gurney
Long-time Trekkies, and other sci-fi fans in general, know all about “aliens of the week” — whatever alien race our heroes are dealing with for the latest episode. They’ll present a particular problem, the protagonists will solve it and the credits will roll. Aliens of the week normally look an awful lot like us, because, well, they have to. When you’re working with human actors, tight filming timelines and limited makeup and CGI budgets, you can’t do much. So you end up with basic “humanoids” with bumpy foreheads, pointed ears, weird skull ridges and ridged noses. If the makeup budget was really lean that week, maybe just some spots. For a regular character, worth investing more budget and creativity into, perhaps you even get a few of those things all at once.
Better CGI and bigger budgets have allowed more modern sci-fi to push the envelope a bit, but still — most sci-fi aliens you see won’t be that different from us. And this might actually be one way in which sci-fi is holding back our expectations and imaginations: While science fiction has no doubt done much to expose us to strange and fantastic concepts and expand our thinking about what’s possible, our own limited imaginations and TV shows and movies full of basically human-ish aliens have probably served to limit our understanding of just how weird alien life could be.
And, accordingly, how likely it may prove.
You’ve been reading a lot about aliens lately, including here at The Line. There has been a surge of high-level talk about UFOs of late — sorry, we’re supposed to call them Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or UAPs, now — and buzz is building ahead of a release this month by the U.S. government of a report that will apparently raise some eyebrows. (No, not like a Vulcan.) A big part of the renewed interest has been a series of video disclosures by the U.S. military, showing encounters with UAPs that seem to defy easy explanation. None of them are smoking phasers of alien contact. But the fact that the U.S. government is at least admitting that there’s stuff out there they can’t explain is by itself a major shift from the eye-rolling and mocking laughter of yore. That shift alone is worth noting.
Something’s up. Is it aliens? Maybe not! As ever, most of these sightings — like, the overwhelming majority — will prove to have mundane explanations, including radar glitches, photographic optical illusions and simple human error. Most of what’s left will have unusual and complicated explanations, but still won’t be due to aliens or any other exotic theory.
But if there are some left over, even just a few, it’s worth thinking about. If they’re out there, what are they like? And why are they here now?
The now question is the easier one to address: maybe they’ve been here for a long time, and we’re just now developing the technology to spot them. Or perhaps our recent advances in space flight are making us more worthy of notice; it is not an exaggeration to say that the last few years have advanced our space exploration capabilities more than we’d seen in the generation before that. It’s entirely plausible that we’re heading down a well-trod path, easily spotted by other civilizations, toward a technological tipping point that warrants, if nothing else, keeping a closer tab on us.
Hey, maybe not. Maybe it’s all just swamp gas. But let’s indulge ourselves here a bit. Purely for the sake of argument, assume the upcoming report is a blockbuster. (It almost certainly won’t be. But assume.) Even if we come to accept with total certainty that aliens are zipping around our planet and mutilating the odd cow, what can we do about it? These encounters seem to involve vehicles that hopelessly outclass our top-of-the-line military equipment. Any kind of official contact between us and another race would almost have to be at the other race’s convenience, and how it goes for humanity would depend very much on what the alien agenda was. If they’re advanced enough to get there, we would be at their mercy.
That’s the conventional wisdom, anyway. It could be totally wrong. Our entire understanding of interstellar travel — voyaging between stars, across enormous distances — is limited by our very human worldview. What might seem impossible or impractical to us might be viewed very differently by, well, them.
We’ve examined what it would take to travel between solar systems. A variety of means of getting there have been proposed, usually in the context of small, unmanned probes. Getting to the closest star to our own would take decades, perhaps more than a century — longer if we bothered to slow down and explore for a while. (My favourite design concept was the one that propels itself by exploding a bunch of nuclear bombs behind itself for two years, riding the shockwave continuously.) These are technologies that we’re confident we could build, but haven’t actually ever tested at scale before. Since sending even small probes would take generations, sending larger ships, with human crews, even if we hand-wave away certain technical challenges — imagine designing a ship that wouldn’t need some time in the shop for 200 years or so! — would take centuries.
“Well, that’s impossible!” was the collective decision of humanity. That’s simply way too unfeasible. And we assume that everyone else out there would see it the same way.
Maybe. But … maybe not. Let’s not fall into the alien-of-the-week trap here. If there’s life out there, it’s bonkers to assume it must view these things through the same lens that we do.
Consider the issue of lifespans, for example. A trip of a century or two is a massive barrier to us. But we only live about 100 years, at the outside. Imagine an alien race with a natural lifespan of 1,000 years. Spending a few decades or even a century or two crossing over to a nearby solar system might still strike them as a major hassle, but it wouldn’t be nearly the obstacle it is to us. Or imagine a race that naturally hibernates for long periods. A few hundred years’ worth of travel might be perceived by them as a solid snooze and nothing more.
Maybe our first contact with aliens will be with beings 10 centimetres tall, who arrive here in a ship of reasonable size to us that is, for them, a gigantic floating city, fit to live in for 10,000 years. Maybe they don’t need ships at all, and simply live in space. Imagine they have mastered the ability of uploading once-organic consciences into computers, ready to be redownloaded into a newly cloned body upon arrival at your destination. Or maybe they are, as recently suggested by Robert Jago in a delightful piece here, self-guided and self-repairing alien drones, bumping through the cosmos exploring stuff millions of years after their alien builders went extinct.
Who knows?! That’s the point. We can’t even begin to know all the things we haven’t begun to know. All of the above things may seem farfetched to us, but could be positively mundane over on Rigel IV.
Again, I expect the report due out in the next few weeks to be, all in, a disappointment. I’m sure it’ll contain some interesting stuff, but I’d be shocked if it makes some kind of big reveal. But if nothing else, it’s still a good opportunity to gut check some of our own, ahem, human-centric perspective. All our assumptions about the challenges of space travel are linked to very human conceptions of time, energy and effort. An alien civilization with radically different priorities and concepts might view it as no more a challenge than humans hitching a ride on the passenger ships that brought waves of immigrants to North America, or serving on the sailing vessels that fanned out from Europe to explore (and exploit) the new world.
There’s a lot of reasons to be skeptical that UFOs are outrunning F-18s off the California coast. But “it would be too hard for aliens to ever get here” isn’t one of them. We can do things now that would have seemed impossible 30 years ago. Imagine where we’ll be in 300 years, with better power sources, faster engines, and perhaps even totally wild new technologies we can barely imagine today.
Now imagine where other civilizations might already be.
I make no predictions. But I dare suggest that, as a species, a bit more humility might be in order. If nothing else, it’s good for the soul.
The Line is Canada’s last, best hope for irreverent commentary. We reject bullshit. We love lively writing. Please consider supporting us by subscribing. Follow us on Twitter @the_lineca. Fight with us on Facebook. Pitch us something: lineeditor@protonmail.com