July 5, 1996
Source: Washington Post
By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 16 1996; Page D01
In the movie "Independence Day" the aliens are space insects. They come to Earth in a hollow spaceship that looks like a beehive. They lack individuality; they are more like a single, collective intelligence, akin to an ant colony.
These aliens are not at all spontaneous, but rather invade the Earth in a synchronized pattern, as though their ravaging is a genetically encoded instinct. They are literally unreasonable. Good guy tries to talk to them, they say only one word: "Die." How unconflicted of them! Where's the conscience? They represent an astonishing concept: an advanced, technological civilization without therapists.
Were the film not a record-breaking hit one might safely ignore its philosophical and exobiological implications. But at some point -- say, $100 million in box office in the first six days -- it behooves us to examine the film's assumptions against the template of scientific orthodoxy.
This doesn't mean that we have to nit-pick every implausibility. There are certain plot turns that one must accept on faith, such as when an Earthling armed with a laptop computer instantly connects to the computer of the alien mother ship. These beings who voyaged across "90 billion light-years" of space are apparently running Windows 95.
The real intriguing issue is the aliens themselves. If there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, is it more likely to be good or evil? Should we expect the aliens to be wise, generous, and gentle, or will they be rapacious monsters who think we ought to be harvested as soon as possible? (And would they think we taste like chicken?)
Scientists are somewhat hesitant to weigh in on the question of alien morality, because there is no database to work with, and because the issue itself is supremely ridiculous. It's a bit like trying to decide whether aliens are more likely to be Republican or Democrat. (Smart money sez: Perot voters.)
Still, some scientists do harbor assumptions about whether extraterrestrials are naughty or nice. Frank Drake, president of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, Calif., was upbraided in 1975 after he sent an encoded message, describing Earth life, from a radio telescope toward a cluster of stars known as M13, in the constellation Hercules, about 26,000 light-years from Earth. A British astronomer, Martin Ryle, denounced the signal in a letter to the president of the International Astronomical Union. He felt it was dangerous. Aliens might come kill us!
There have been no other intentional Earth signals toward outer space since Drake's experiment.
Of course, most scientists flatly reject stories of flying saucers and alien abductions by little bald men with almond-shaped eyes, and they fear that any discussion of the appearance or nature of extraterrestrials will consign them to the kook camp. But once you get beyond the stipulations, caveats and cautionary notes, there are some interesting theories floating around about aliens.
Drake himself believes alien life forms are "likely to be good. Because if they're bad, they're likely to have destroyed themselves. Bad ones blow themselves up in nuclear war."
Robert Wright, a science writer and author of "The Moral Animal," argues that natural selection -- the engine of evolution -- produces organisms that compete with one another. We think of evolution as pitting species against species, but it's really a process of innumerable internecine conflicts, neighbor vs. neighbor, McCoys vs. Hatfields. Thus any intelligent beings, wherever they appear, will likely have an evolutionary history of aggression, competition and violence. "If they had acquired the technology to travel between stars and had not used technology that powerful to blow up their planet in the process, I think it would mean they had reached some high moral plane," Wright says.
But this is guesswork, not science. "Exobiology" has long been ridiculed as the science without a subject. When talking of alien life, we have no choice but to extrapolate from Earth life. So we really end up talking about ourselves -- who we are, why we are here, why we turned out this way.
The scientific orthodoxy is that life on Earth is not a supernatural event (the Book of Genesis notwithstanding) but the result of a sequence of random natural events that presumably could occur on any planet in the universe, given the right initial conditions, such as the presence of liquid water.
Scientists are far more divided on whether extraterrestrial life, if it exists, is likely to include anything that we would call intelligent. Astronomer Paul Davies, in "Are We Alone?," argues that consciousness is a fundamental feature of the universe -- that it is an inevitable outcome of the initial condition of the cosmos and the laws of nature.
"Given long enough, the emergence of life and consciousness should be automatic consequences of the outworkings of the laws of physics," Davies writes.
Such comments reflect the hottest issue in evolutionary biology: What's inevitable and what's flukish? Are human beings the culmination of evolution, or are we just a quirk, no more biologically significant than algae or toads? Some of the most influential biologists, such as Stephen Jay Gould, are decidedly in the latter camp; others, like Davies, prefer the theory that "order" naturally emerges from "complexity," and that with enough time any simple bacterium will find a way to evolve into a mathematician or cosmologist.
If this second group is right, and the universe is filled with warm, wet, life-friendly planets, then aliens should be all over the place. Thinking. Plotting. Building spaceships. Sharpening their knives?
The aliens in "Independence Day" are kind of a biological hybrid. They're not noticeably conscious. They may be a form of creature discussed occasionally by philosophers and biologists: intelligent but without consciousness. (A computer is an intelligent but non-conscious entity.) The "Independence Day" aliens behave as though they have no choice in what they are doing -- it doesn't seem to occur to them that they might not wipe out everyone on Earth. A conscious villain usually has to pause to explain why he's such a bad guy. Ideally he comes up with an elaborate, challenging way to kill everyone, because he prefers to be "sporting."
"They're like locusts!" says the brave American president moments after surviving a near-lethal thought-beam from a captured alien.
Pop culture oscillates on the topic. In "The War of the Worlds" the octopus-like aliens ravage the planet before getting zapped by Earth microbes. In a famous "Twilight Zone" (or was it an "Outer Limits"? -- the eternal question, dating back, no doubt, to Aristotle), aliens make nice with humans and solve lots of Earth problems and then start loading them up in the alien ship to take to the alien planet. A scientist, meanwhile, has been trying to decode an alien book titled "How to Serve Humans." His colleague finally figures it out. But it's too late -- the scientist is already boarding the spaceship by the time his friend comes running to tell him: "It's a cookbook!!!"
The competing paradigm, in which aliens are benign and cuddly, has been promoted by Steven Spielberg, among others. In "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," his aliens are hairless, gender-neutral beings with a notable lack of muscle tone. No decathletes, they. In "E.T.," the alien is basically a stuffed animal with sleepy bedroom eyes.
Scientists don't necessarily disagree. Drake reckons that aliens would necessarily have certain features analogous to human life forms.
"They're likely to have heads, because you need something to hold the brain in and protect it. You need a central reasoning organ and memory organ. They are likely to have something like arms, because they need something to manipulate tools, or else they're not likely to be technological," he says.
The "Independence Day" aliens follow that pattern: big buggy heads, and enough tentacles for a year's supply of calamari.
Philip Morrison, a theoretical physicist emeritus at MIT, says: "I don't think these beings will be smaller than a meter or larger than three meters; smaller than 50 pounds or larger than 500 pounds. If it's smaller than 50 pounds it won't have a big, complex neural system. And if it's larger than 500 pounds it will collapse under gravitation."
In other words, intelligence and physiognomy are inextricably linked. Morrison goes so far as to guess that aliens wouldn't be water creatures because they couldn't see the sky -- and thus wouldn't become astronomers.
Adducing alien morality is a far trickier business. The "good aliens" theory may be a projection -- we like to think species become more ethical as they become more technological. Timothy Ferris, a science writer and author of, among other books, "The Mind's Sky: Human Intelligence in a Cosmic Context," says the notion that intelligent extraterrestrial beings would necessarily be benign is "a typical underinformed Birkenstock vegetarian wishful-thinking point of view. The great periods of intellectual advancement were not periods where everyone was nice to one another."
But Ferris does raise one major problem with evil, totalitarian, Darth Vader-style aliens: They might not succeed as scientists. Ferris believes that science is a bottom-up, non-hierarchical enterprise that cannot flourish in a totalitarian regime.
"They can't be these jackbooted Death Star models we see in science fiction, because those societies can't support science in the long run," Ferris says.
Everything comes back to Earth at some point. If the only way to understand aliens is to extrapolate from humans, then we first need to figure ourselves out. Any understanding of extraterrestrial morality is contingent upon a purely terrestrial mystery:
Are we good or evil?
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