As a species, we’re faced with a number of big problems that need solving. Some feel more abstract than others, but it sure would suck if we were wrong about that. And while sci-fi can be pure escapism, when it does, hopefully it serves as a mild indulgence rather than something which lets us ignore problems in the real world. As I’ve said before, it is part of my mission with this blog to get readers to not just watch sci-fi but to use it; to understand its effects and limitations; to decide how believable its scenarios are; and to think about the lessons you can take back with you to the real world.
This is why Forbidden Planet is such a stellar movie for me.
It is a singular example (in the survey at least) of humans encountering an ancient, vastly advanced, dead civilization through the “ruins” of its technology. There was no tense tête–à–tête diplomacy, or sexily-foreign green aliens to seduce, or any of those other Terran imperialist thrills.
I’m not exactly sure which of those two possibilities this image represents.
I don’t want to demean its historical importance. It came at a time in cinematic history after a few decades where Hollywood created little more sci-fi than space opera for kids, and it proved enough of a commercial and critical success that suddenly sci-fi was a serious consideration for big budget attention. That meant broader reach, and more people thinking about speculative futures. (Heck, it meant enough serious sci-fi that I could keep a blog about the genre. So, you know, thanks for that.)
But more than its historical importance is that it’s the best model of a likely future. Just this past May, Adam Frank (an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester) and Woodruff Sullivan published “A New Empirical Constraint on the Prevalence of Technological Species in the Universe.” In the paper they note that the 1,284 new exoplanets discovered by the Kepler observatory scientists puts some lower-limit constraints on a few factors in the Drake equation.
Image credit: NASA/Tim Pyle
“Three of the seven terms in Drake’s equation are now known. We know the number of stars born each year. We know that the percentage of stars hosting planets is about 100. And we also know that about 20 to 25 percent of those planets are in the right place for life to form. This puts us in a position, for the first time, to say something definitive about extraterrestrial civilizations—if we ask the right question.”
Their work suggests that the odds are in favor of finding alien life—but finding evidence of it long dead. They suggest a shift in our attentions away from contacting a living civilization, towards cosmic archaeology. You know, like Forbidden Planet illustrates.
Number of Technological Species Ever in the Universe, from the paper.
Frankly it could stop there and be canonized for that purpose, but the film goes one better
We still don’t have great constraints for the other troubling component of Drake’s equation, and that’s how long technological civilizations tend to last. That question in turn raises the darker question of what tends to doom those civilizations. One possibility is that it is that technology itself is the thing, which is, again, what Forbidden Planet illustrates.
This is a blog about sci-fi interfaces, and I presume that readers are, like me, directly involved in shaping technology. So it is that this 60 year-old film has a one-two punch. It shows us both what the future will probably be like, and then turns our attention to something we can think about—and work to make right—now.
Sci-fi likes to tell stories about the Prime Directive Fermi answer. But is it the most useful answer? Keep in mind that most of us are not working in space programs. For us, sci-fi is less direct inspiration to go build the most kick-ass rocketship we can, but rather inform how we think about and support the space program culturally and politically. With that in mind, let’s spend a little bit of time talking about the effects of confronting each hypothesis in our sci-fi. To be able to compare apples to apples, let’s apply the same thinking to each.
What would be the call to action (if any) if this hypothesis is true?
What if this is true, but we fail to act on it?
What if it’s true, and we do act on it?
Warning: This will be long, but if we’re thinking strategy, risk aversion, and opportunity maximization (as we are) we have to be thorough.
Life is rare
All life is precious, Daryl.
These stories tell us to not get our hopes up about thrilling tales of space imperialism. We need to get our shit sorted, since, no, we won’t have peace treaties with Romulan Sith, but we will have our hands full dealing with our own worst natures and the weirdness of natural space problems like black holes and special relativity. While we go about this, we should take advantage of this freakish circumstance by protecting life for the precious thing it is.
What if it’s true, but we fail to act on it?
We squander life’s only chance, fail to protect ourselves or the network of life on which we depend, and die out. It’s not a guarantee, but a greater risk.
What if it’s true, and we act on it?
Then we ensure our (and all life’s) survival, escape the planet before the sun goes red giant, and try to colonize the galaxy to increase life’s chances out there.
Fearful silence
Maybe they’ll just ignore us.
I’ll lump the physical and the informational threats into one discussion bucket, because these serve as similar dire warnings. They tell us that we need to keep quiet and/or deliberately deaf until we know what’s out there, and build strong offense and defense capabilities for when they do show up.
What if it’s true, but we fail to act on it?
We could be advertising our tender, tasty flesh up the nearest thing that would try to treat us like their personal fast food depot. Or we could be broadcasting our picturesque and utterly defenseless natural resources. And it is very much in our interest to keep those things intact.
What if it’s true, and we act on it?
You might think that we can shut up and stay hidden while we protect our defensive and maybe even offensive capabilities. The bad news is that ship has sailed. Not only have we shot out a few calling cards voyaging into the void, we’ve been leaking radio emissions for the better part of a century. That spherical announcement will continue through the universe for a long time. Even before humans evolved, our atmosphere was announcing the presence of life through signature biogasses. If there’s a hyperadvanced superpredator out there, they already know about us, and we don’t have the time scales, species coordination, or resources to do anything other than beg forgiveness when they get here.
OK. If we put all our efforts into offense and defense we might slightly increase the odds of or duration of our survival, but the odds are very much against it. We should hope that this Fermi hypothesis is unlikely.
Prime Directives?
Any of the Prime Directives call us to keep striving, inventing, maturing, evolving, and exploring. One day we’ll figure out or accidentally pass the test and BAM—we’ll be having space adventures and chuckling about how long it took us.
What if it’s true, but we fail to act on it?
We continue to be isolated, ignorant, and alone, an embarrassing backwater species unable to pick itself out of the blood, poop, and mud.
What if it’s true, and we act on it?
Since the exact nature of the Prime Directive is unknown to us, our action in this scenario is to just keep at it, and performing well and behaving well for our invisible observers. To improve our advertising, to demonstrate our achievements, knowledge, moral fiber, and compatibility with alien life. Eventually, we pass the test, have the universe open up to us, and finally get to taste Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters.
Zoo/Planetarium/Disguises
I’ll lump these three together because in each case, there’s a “reality” under the surface of things we’ve yet to uncover. But it’s worth nothing that each implies we were either put in this circumstance or deliberately kept here. The call to action for us is to continue as we have been, but be prepared for the nasty shock when it comes. Perhaps the call to action is to try and find the seams of our cage, to prove the nature of our reality, identify and maybe learn to communicate with our captors.
What if it’s true, but we fail to act on it?
Failing to act in this case is to…what…not seek out the truth of our reality?
What if it’s true, and we act on it?
Then we look for the cage, the disguises, or containing display. Maybe we even escape. But when the true nature of reality comes, we’re going to have a very sobering moment. Maybe it will be akin to Dave Bowman when his mind was blown by the second obelisk in 2001.
But we should ask ourselves: What happens when a dangerous animal escapes its paddock at the zoo? At the very best, the animal is sedated and put back in the zoo. Maybe with its collective memory wiped? Worse is the animal escapes to the wild where it learns it has zero of the skills necessary to survive there, even though instinct drove it there. In the worst case, the animal is killed to protect the visitors, or to prevent the rest of the zoo from catching wise. It might be that it’s in our best interest to stay in the pretty and utterly safe fishbowl.
Logistics
I don’t know that the category of logistics means anything in this context. If it’s genuinely logistical reasons we haven’t found aliens, then it’s unlikely our efforts will be able to overcome those reasons any more than other civilizations much more advanced than us. So the call to action is that it doesn’t matter if there are or aren’t aliens, because we’ll never encounter them. Then we shift into a Life is Rare circumstance.
Natural disasters
Courtesy NASA/JPL–Caltech
We know these happen, as the geologic record tells many tales of catastrophic terrors long before the modern anthropogenic one, and worse even than the Chicxulub comet that killed off the dinosaurs. Like most disaster porn, this can be the unifying force humanity needs to band together and figure out a way around, out, or through it. The call to action is for us to get a much more robust sensor network in place, have scenarios plotted out in advance with actionable and tested contingency plans for each one. It also implies colonizing the galaxy so all our eggs aren’t in this single planetary basket. Maybe create a panspermia technology all our own.
What if it’s true, but we fail to act on it?
We might get blindsided. We might defund (or continue underfunding) astronomy initiatives to keep an eye out for just these things, or be scientifically undereducated to manage. We could be wiped out.
What if it’s true, and we act on it?
We invest in research, sensors, and defenses such that we can detect and stop the threats to our existence. I’m not sure it will be oil riggers suddenly trained for space travel. But we will be protected. Hopefully this does not come at the cost of exploration, since one of the things we are protecting against is the sun’s red giant phase.
They are inconceivable
If aliens are inconceivable, what is the call to action? It could be to continue forward but be prepared, as we should be with the Zoo hypothesis, for a rude awakening. Another might be to try and accelerate our own evolution so we might be able to conceive them. But since it’s impossible to know what we’re hoping to conceive that seems directionless. Another might be to keep building something bigger than ourselves that might be able to perceive them, like super artificial intelligence.
What if it’s true, but we fail to act on it?
It might be mundane, like getting our planet paved over for an interstellar bypass. It might be terrible, winding up in the giant maw of the Space Angler Fish, or under the magnifying glass of the terrible Space Pre-Teen. It might be euphoric, if they have a policy of kindness to lower-order creatures. (This is not the precedent we ourselves have set.) Since they are inconceivable, there is no way to know what this might be.
What if it’s true, and we act on it?
We will be the ants spelling out “Hello world” on the beach, much to the amazement of the people witnessing it. We may have an A.I. that tells us gently what it finds. We might just understand the existential terror and have time to escape or shore up defenses. We might advance our evolution to greater heights, or toy with the building blocks of life and destroy ourselves. There’s no clear positive or negative that’s implied.
Our tech will destroy us
If tech is the threat, the call to action is to take a much more careful approach to our technology. On one extreme, to adopt an Amish-ish approach, and abandon it all. On the other, to carefully limit its capabilities, or test it for generation in sandboxes so it can be destroyed if necessary. Or another, to build in robust failsafes while we go whole-hog forward into our technological future. Or roll the dice and hope one of our good technologies saves us from the self-destructive one.
What if it’s true, but we fail to act on it?
We are wiped out by our powerful technology.
What if it’s true, and we act on it?
We will keep a critical eye on not just the novelty features of tech, but its possible effects at the broadest scale, and consider that in our designs, use of technology, and policies. We’ll be careful with technology.
The set of possibilities
If, as I mentioned at the beginning of the post, we look at it from a strategic perspective, we should ask ourselves which of the possibilities we should keep thinking about, and encourage that kind of sci-fi storytelling to encourage us to keep on track.
It is admittedly more craft than science.
To do this we would look for those hypothesis which offer the greatest danger to avoid, and the greatest opportunity on the far side, which leads us to three: Life is Rare, Natural Disasters, and Tech will Destroy Us. Each of these has a deep dark chasm if they are true but we fail to act, and a terrific upside if we manage to succeed, survival being chief among them.
If we had to go further, and pick a primary one from these, it seems that Tech will Destroy Us carries both the biggest threat of self-destruction, the thing most under our control, and which solving may contribute to the successfully dealing with most of the others.
Then we have to note that, per my prior post, this isn’t the one sci-fi has told its stories about. We like to tell stories about Prime Directives. And this takes us back, in the next post, to Forbidden Planet.
In the prior post we introduced the Fermi paradox—or Fermi question—before an overview of the many hypotheses that try to answer the question, and ended noting that we must consider what we are to do, given the possibilities. In this post I’m going to share which of those hypotheses that screen-based sci-fi has chosen to tell stories about.
First we should note that screen sci-fi (this is, recall, a blog that concerns itself with sci-fi in movies and television), since the very, very beginning, has embraced questionably imperialist thrills. In Le Voyage dans la Lune, George Melies’ professor-astronomers encounter a “primitive” alien culture on Earth’s moon when they land there, replete with costumes, dances, and violent responses to accidental manslaughter. Hey, we get it, aliens are part of why audiences and writers are in it: As a thin metaphor for speculative human cultures that bring our own into relief. So, many properties are unconcerned with the *yawn* boring question of the Fermi paradox, instead imagining a diegesis with a whole smörgåsbord of alien civilizations that are explicitly engaged with humans, at times killing, trading, or kissing us, depending on which story you ask.
But some screen sci-fi does occasionally concern itself with the Fermi question.
Which are we telling stories about?
Screen sci-fi is a vast library, and more is being produced all the time, so it’s hard to give an exact breakdown, but if Drake can do it for Fermi’s question, we can at least ballpark it, too. To do this, I took a look at every sci-fi in the survey that produced Make It So and has been extended here on scifiinterfaces.com, and I tallied the breakdown between aliens, no aliens, and silent aliens. Here’s the Google Sheet with the data. And here’s what we see.
No aliens is the clear majority of stories! This is kind of surprising for me, since when I think of sci-fi my brain pops bug eyes and tentacles alongside blasters and spaceships. But it also makes sense because a lot of sci-fi is near future or focused on the human condition.
Some notes about these numbers.
I counted all the episodes or movies that exist in a single diegesis as one. So the two single largest properties in the sci-fi universe, Star Trek and Star Wars, only count once each. That seems unfair, since we’ve spent lots more total minutes of our lives with C3PO and the Enterprise crews than we have with Barbarella. This results in low-seeming numbers. There’s only 53 diegeses at the time of this writing even though it spans thousands of hours of shows. But all that said, this is ballpark problem, meant to tally rationales across diegeses, so we’ll deal with numbers that skew differently than our instincts would suggest. Someone else with a bigger budget of time or money can try and get exhaustive with the number, attempt to normalize for total minutes of media produced, and again for number of alien species referenced at their leisure, and then again for how popular the particular show was. Those numbers may be different.
Additionally the categorizations can be ambiguous. Should Star Trek go in “Silent Aliens” because of the Prime Directive, or under “Aliens” since the show has lots and lots and lots of aliens? Since the Fermi question seeks to answer why Silent Aliens are silent in our real world now, I opted for Silent Aliens, but that’s an arguable choice. Should The Martian count as “Life is Rare” since it’s competence porn that underscores how fragile life is? Should Deep Impact show that life is rare even though they never talk about aliens? It’s questionable to categorize something on a strong implication, but I did it where I felt the connection was strong. Additionally I may have ranked something as “no reason” because I missed an explanatory line of dialog somewhere. Please let me know if I missed something major or got something wrong in the comments.
All that said, let’s look back and see how those broad numbers break down when we look at individual Fermi hypotheses. First, we should omit shows with aliens. They categorically exclude themselves. Aliens is an obvious example. Also, let’s exclude shows that are utterly unconcerened with the question of aliens, e.g. Logan’s Run, (or those that never bother to provide an explanation as to why aliens may have been silent for so long, e.g. The Fifth Element.) We also have to dismiss the other show in the survey that shows a long-dead species but does not investigate why, Total Recall (1990). Aaaaand holy cow, that takes us down to only 8 shows that give some explanation for the historical absence or silence of aliens. Since that number is so low, I’ll list the shows explicitly to the right of their numbers. I’ll leave the numbers as percentages for consistency when I get to increase the data set.
No Aliens
8% Life is rare: Battlestar Galactica (2004) 25% Life doesn’t last (Natural disasters): Deep Impact, The Core, Armaggedon 8% Life doesn’t last (Technology will destroy us): Forbidden Planet
Silent Aliens
8% Superpredators: Oblivion 0% Information is dangerous 33% Prime directive: The Day the Earth Stood Still, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Mission to Mars, Star Trek 0% Isolationism 0% Zoo 0% Planetarium 0% Lighthouse hello 0% Still ringing 8% Hicksville: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy 0% Too distributed 0% Tech mismatch 0% Inconceivability 0% Too expensive 8% Cloaked: Men in Black
(*2% lost to rounding)
It’s at this point that some readers are sharpening their keyboards to inform me of the shows I’ve missed, and that’s great. I would rather have had the data before, but I’m just a guy and nothing motivates geeks like an incorrect pop culture data set. We can run these numbers again when more come in and see what changes.
In the meantime, the first thing we note is that of those that concern themselves with the question of Silent Aliens, most use some version of the prime directive.
Respectively, they say we have to do A Thing before they’ll contact us.
Mature ethically
Mature technologically by finding the big obelisk on the moon (and then the matching one around Jupiter)
Mature technologically by mastering faster-than-light travel
Find the explanatory kiosk/transportation station on Mars
It’s easy to understand why Prime Directives would be attractive as narrative rationales. It explains why things are so silent now, and puts the onus on us as a species to achieve The Thing, to do good, to improve. They are inspirational and encourage us to commit to space travel.
The second thing to note, is that those that concern themselves with the notion that Life Doesn’t Last err toward disaster porn, which is attractive because such films are tried and true formulas. The dog gets saved along with the planet, that one person died, there’s a ticker tape parade after they land, and the love interests reconcile. Some are ridiculous. Some are competent. None stand out to me as particularly memorable or life changing. I can’t think of one that illustrates how it is inevitable.
So prime directives and disaster porn are the main answers we see in sci-fi. Are those the right ones? I’ll discuss that in the next post. Stay Tuned.
For its 60th anniversary I hosted a sci-if movie night at the Roxie cinema in San Francisco of the 1951 classic Forbidden Planet. It was delightful to see it on the big screen with the Roxie’s gorgeous projection system and hear that crazy soundtrack through their audio system.
You can practically hear this screen shot, can’t you?
After the show, I broke with my usual tradition of discussing any of the interfaces (after all, I’d already reviewed all of them on the blog years ago, and recently discussed the film in depth with the guys at Decipher Sci-fi) and instead discussed an idea that’s present in the film. In this handful of posts, I’m going to represent that content, but also add some additional content that there just wasn’t time for before we had to leave the cinema to make way for the next show.
Necessary Spoilers: In Forbidden Planet, a platoon travels to Altair IV to figure out why a 19-year old colony of scientists has gone silent. They meet Morbius, the only survivor of the original colony, and his daughter Altaira. They learn that Morbius has discovered the complete knowledge and technological remains of a long-dead, highly advanced civilization called the Krell. Through the Krell’s still-working machines Morbius has greatly enhanced his intelligence, but unwittingly unleashed an invisible “monster from the id” that has violently destroyed everyone but him and his family. Morbius refuses to return to Earth with Captain Adams, and so Adams grounds the mission while his crew uses parts of the ship to construct a communication device to ask for orders. During the downtime, with some truly wince-worthy 1950s slut-shaming courtship, Captain Adams somehow wins the heart of Altaira, who falls for it and defies her father and becomes engaged to the captain. Crushed by the betrayal, Morbius’ control of the monster wanes, and it attacks and defeats him. His world asunder, Morbius decides in his dying moments to scuttle the entire planet, including all traces of the Krell. From a safe observing distance in space, Adams, Altaira, and the surviving crew watch the explosion before heading back to Earth.
The movie presents one answer to a long-standing astronomical question,
“With 400 billion stars in our galaxy, and 400 billion galaxies in the observable universe, and billions of years of time since the start of the universe, even if only a very small fraction of stars produced advanced civilizations, where the hell is everybody? Why does space seem so devoid of life?”
This question is commonly known as the Fermi Paradox. It’s not really a paradox in the logical sense, so it works better in discussions to call it the Fermi question.
“The universe is a pretty big place. If it’s just us, seems like an awful waste of space.” –Carl Sagan
In this post I’m going to review a categorical deconstruction of the many hypotheses that seek to answer the question. If you’re already familiar with the topic, feel free to skip this post and check out the next one, in which I look at which of the hypotheses that screen sci-fi likes to talk about. If you’re not familiar with these hypotheses, would like a refresher, or want to check how I did in my explanation, read on.
The question is deeply troubling for a tribal species who came into being on a planet just lousy with life. Many people have put forth many theories, but by my reckoning they break down categorically into two broad supergroups five subgroups. But before we talk about those hypotheses, we should take a look at an equation.
Drake’s buzzkill
About eleven years after Fermi asked his question, an astrophysicist named Frank Drake created a probabilistic equation by which we could come up with some answer about how many civilizations we might expect to find out there in the void. Now this isn’t like most equations for which you expect to get a single answer. This equation hopes to get us at least in the ballpark of the right right answer, say to an order of magnitude within the actual one. Just so we can know whether we’re talking about 10, 100, or 1,000 civilizations, etc. Drake’s equation has seven variables which we multiply together to produce an answer.
How often are stars created?
What fraction of these stars have planets?
What fraction of these planets could support life?
What fraction of these planets do support life?
What fraction of these develop symbolic intelligence?
What fraction of these produce detectable signs?
How long do these civilizations last (in a detectable way)?
Since each of these are an estimate, with only statistically insignificant observed data to inform them, the equation ultimately produces a broad range of numbers. With the variables filled in, Drake got a low number of 1,000. At the high end, with the dials of the components each turned up to a scientifically plausible maximum, there can be upwards of 100 millioncivilizations. More modern estimates put it much higher, with a high estimate of 280 million civilizations out there—right now—that we should be able to detect. Many of which should be much, much older and presumably much more advanced than ours, and spread throughout the universe.
That puts the question into some context by which we can think about it, and begin to understand some of the hypotheses.
Life is rare
The first group of hypotheses wrap around components 2–6 of the Drake equation, by asserting that each of these things are prohibitively rare. Even with more and more exoplanets being found all the time, theories go that having all the conditions is too fantastic of a proposition. We are biased to think we’re likely because we exist, but we must consider that our sun is just the right size, our planet is just the right kind of rocky and orbits in just the right zone around our star for favorable temperatures, we have just the right mix of chemicals present back in the day, we have a silent and invisible bodyguard in the solar system called Jupiter, &c &c. If any one of these links in the long chain that led to us was off, we wouldn’t be here. And for that reason, it’s just us.
There is another subcategory of why there are no aliens out there, but first let’s look at the reasons why they might be there, and being silent.
There are aliens out there, they’re just silent
There are a lot of these, but you can think of them as being a result of danger, policy, or logistics.
It’s Dangerous
It’s possible that there exist untold dangers in space, and so it is wise to hide. This could be because a superpredator species patrols the darkness, ensuring its place atop the space food chain by destroying any others it comes into contact with, and so surviving species have learned to hide themselves. Broadcasting our presence on earth is like banging a drum and shouting while walking through a jungle teeming with hungry tigers.
Another of these explanations is that messages themselves might be dangerous. The threat comes from the ideas that are conveyed between the stars, that drive receiving species insane or trick them into self-destruction. Even if there’s no hope of bodily confronting aliens, you can’t even risk their information. So they go quiet.
It’s Policy
It might be that—even if there’s no inherent risk in contact—after thinking about it long and hard, alien civilizations have decided as a whole that they’re not interested in communication with us. It could be an isolationist policy derived from philosophical principles or part of intergalactic agreements. Maybe we’ve already been violating that Treaty of Silence. It would be a terrifically weird first encounter to receive our first verifiable message from alien intelligence, only to have it read, “Hush, you.”
It could be that advanced civilizations agree not to unduly influence or “pollute” primitive ones. Maybe there’s an endangered planets law in effect that keeps aliens at bay from this mudball of monkeys. Or maybe we have some technological or ethical threshold to cross before they’re allowed contact. The threshold could be surpassing the speed of light, picking up the giant phone they left orbiting Jupiter for us, or demonstrating ethical maturity by demonstrating compassion for all living beings instead of you know, slaughtering and subjugating everything in sight for profit, sport, or lunch. I’m lovin’ it.
It could be that we are mistaken about the nature of our reality. Maybe we live in a carefully constructed zoo or farm, and zookeepers/ranchers only let visitors observe our habitat from a distance or under careful concealment, or when some of us are being harvested for the deep fryers. Perhaps some vast distance from the center of our sun is a spherical planetarium display on which an empty universe glows very, very convincingly for us (and behind which the aliens watch). Or maybe we’re wrong about the nature of everything, and we are part of a virtual reality program, only as self-aware as we have been programmed to be.
It’s Logistics
Or maybe it’s not deliberate at all. It’s just the way things work. Perhaps they are all shouting their greetings, but that communication comes as a rare beam that sweeps around its source every million years or so. If we just missed the last passes, we might just need to wait a few million years for the next broadcast. Maybe they’re like space cicadas, and their life cycles have them out of the ground (and detectable) only once every several thousand years.
Or maybe they are happy to answer our greeting, but we’re just impatient, because it will take our messages a very very long time to reach them? In this phone’s still ringing hypothesis, if they’re pretty far away, or think on a much slower time scale, we may need to keep saying hello for thousands or millions of years before they realize it isn’t just a weird blip on the radar.
It could be that we were just unlucky enough to have evolved in Hicksville, far away from the big city lights. As a result our messages dilute too much before it reaches them. Or maybe we’re uninteresting. Sure, they heard us, and we’re just an annoyance, messing with their reception of the latest episode of Game of Space Thrones.
It could be that space is bigger than we think, and the numbers of civilizations are lower than we thought, and the distribution is too great between us. We are seafarers living on very distant islands. One theory complicates the problem even further by saying it’s not just distribution in space but across dimensions, too.
It could be that we’re shouting through a tin can and they’re talking on cell phones. Maybe we just don’t have the right technology yet to detect their messages, and they’re not listening to our primitive electromagnetic waves. Do you spend time at a lake looking for messages in the ripples on the water? I don’t.
It could be (and this is my favorite) they’re just too alien for us to conceive. We expect them to be some variation of life on our planet, but they’re nothing like what our brains can handle. Think of how difficult it would be for ants to conceive of humans, or to understand our efforts at communication. They don’t have the eardrums to receive the signals as we do, or the memories to keep the first part of the sentence in place while we get to the end. If we bothered to figure out their chemical language, the best we could hope is to convey “done/not done,” “Protect the queen!” or some such. Even if we expose ourselves physically to them, if they can conceive of us at all, we would be “threat” or “large mammal” at best, or possibly even “vast, warmish, irregular, hairy landscapes.” Why would they think to communicate with the landscape? Why would we? We don’t have anything to say with ants, and we evolved on and live on the same planet.
That analogy helps explain another hypothesis. We are a species struggling with our own set of problems like feeding ourselves, caring for our young, avoiding wars, battling our worst natures, wondering about the meaning of life, enjoying life’s pleasures and getting there early enough for good seats at the sci-if movie. Our resources are already tapped out. How much money and effort do we want to spend trying to communicate with ants? It might just be too expensive in resources or effort to either colonize or communicate. They have other things on their minds.
A number of other hypothesis entail the last idea, that they are here, all around us, and they’re just well-hidden, perhaps for one of the other reasons we’ve already discussed.
So that is an overview of the reasons why they might be there but apparently silent from where we float. Let’s return now to the other (and darker) hypothesis about why they may not be out there at all.
Life doesn’t last
This last subcategory concerns the very last component of Drake’s equation, and that is how long civilizations tend to last in the universe, because of external or internal forces.
The universe is a chaotic place. Could it be that random natural disasters of an incalculable scale just occasionally happen? Like lightning that just seems to sort of appear out of nowhere and scar the ground as it leaps up to the skies, maybe events wipe out sections of the universe every billion years or so, and any civilizations that have evolved since then just go poof, caught up like ants unfortunate enough to have built their bed on the hill where the lightning is brewing. Consider that our sun has an estimated life span, and we only have about 5 billion years before it undergoes a transition to become a red giant, ballooning to eventually swallow Mars, Venus, and yes, Earth. To the best of our science, that’s a long way off but coming, and we have no idea how we would survive it.
Or maybe it’s some unfortunate fact about civilizations themselves. What if the sophistication that gives rise to civilization always entails self-destruction? Yes, we have sent Voyager into space, eradicated smallpox, and greatly eased life for some subset of humanity. But we’ve also trashed the planet, dumped millions of tons of plastic into our oceans that have broken down into a toxic slurry gyre that is poisoning our entire food chain. We’ve overfished the oceans and seas to the brink of extinction. We’ve relied on nuclear power that, when it fails, it maims and kills people in horrific ways and renders parts of the earth uninhabitable for millions of years. We continue to deplete limited natural resources for short term gains. We’ve overpopulated the planet to its breaking point, and anthropogenically warmed the atmosphere so that our glaciers are crumbling and weather patterns are swerving between greater and greater extremes. We are constantly at war with each other somewhere. We have poisoned, burned, gassed, and dropped fucking nuclear bombs on people. We’ve very nearly come to global thermonuclear war several times, rendering the surface of the planet a radioactive wasteland, fit only for the likes of insects and invertebrates. Every technology we build gets used for good and bad, and the more powerful those technologies become, the more at risk we put our very existence. Maybe this is some intractable truth for for every civilization in the universe, and not one of them has managed to control the technological genie once it’s out of the bottle.
OK. Whew. That’s it. Take a moment to walk off the existential dread there if you need to.
For purposes of argument, the literature about the we-are-alone hypotheses presume that there is one challenge that is greater than all the rest, and calls this the Great Filter. We’ll use the term as well. If the great filter is behind us, well, lucky us, but that will prove intergalactically lonely and a little depressing. This is it. We’re stuck with us. But hey, buck up little camper, at least we made it. We’re here. We got the chance to do the right thing.
If the great filter is ahead of us, in the form of a natural disaster or self-destruction, it goes from lonely to terrifying. Can we survive? What exactly is the nature of the threat? What do we need to do to prepare ourselves? Will our humanity survive The Thing We Must Do? Where do we put our resources in preparation?
Which brings us, as so many things do, to sci-fi, which I’ll talk about in the next post.
In a recent email exchange, Olli Sulopuisto of Nonfiktio (trigger warning: Finnish) asked me a damned fine question. I’m a fan of damned fine questions, and occasionally my answers make it out into the world.
His damned fine question(s) follow(s).
…is studying movie UIs, I dunno, useful? As in—does it function as an exercise, the same as breaking down and analyzing any UI would? Have you learned something from sci-fi interfaces that would’ve been more difficult or impossible to gain by other means?
What follows is a slightly edited version of my response to him. If you’re short on time, the short answer is “Yes,” but the fun comes in the form of this longer answer.
1. You build necessary skepticism.
Scifi is so very cool that—if we watch it but don’t study it—our stupid brains want to believe because it’s so cool that it also must be good and desirable. You might want the stuff you design to be like the stuff you’ve seen in the movies, when in fact even the cool stuff (maybe especially the cool stuff) would cause disasters in the real world. So studying it critically is important to build up your design immune system, your critical eye, so you are not led astray.
I speak about this in the Gorgeous+Catastrophic talk.
2. You get their good ideas
Sci-fi is outsider art as far as interaction design and usability is concerned, and those whackball outsiders have occasionally come up with some really, really cool ideas for how it could work in the real world. This is infrequent. This can often fly by your attention amidst all the swirling spectacle, but when you find these gems, they can inform your work.
One example is the hierarchical scaling of imperial holograms in Star Wars. It’s right for the audience for some solid psychological reasons, and so should be considered when designing similar systems in the real world. Studying sci-fi is like having an advisor wholly concerned with blue sky thinking on your team. Useful to have in the mix.
I speak about this interface near the end of the talk that Nathan and I have given about “Influences.”
3. You can use their bad ideas to come up with good ones.
Sometimes, sci-fi gets it right without intending to. The gunner seat in the Millennium Falcon is my favorite example. When you first realize that sound can’t travel through space you want to dismiss it, but then you realize that if it was smart, the interface would add that sound in because it is incredibly useful field information for the gunner to have. This only becomes obvious through the technique of apologetics, which requires careful study to find what’s broken and then see if you can think yourself through to why it’s brilliant.
I speak about this in the “Apologetics” talk, last given in the Netherlands at The Web and Beyond conference.
4. You can avoid their mistakes
When sci-fi gets it wrong they can get it very wrong, and it’s rarely because they’re not trying. Much of it will be because they’re working towards different goals than real-world designers, and they don’t need to care about the same things we care about. But some of it will be because they didn’t think it through, and the actors will do what the script requires, even if it doesn’t make sense to us. These moments can be instructive and serve as a touchstone for what not to do in your own design work.
See the anti-examples in the “Influences” talk linked above.
5. It’s great analytical and design practice.
In reviewing dozens and dozens of sci-fi UIs, I’ve gotten good at quickly and thoroughly being able to review interfaces in the real world. To apologize for them. To learn from them and yes improve them. I have 100 years of sci-fi interfaces to sharpen my skills on. One handful of anecdotes supporting this is that attendees tell me the workshop I run, Redesigning Star Wars, is one of their favorite of all time.
App experience is so fragmented there are only a few that you can count on others on your design team having. Browsers? But Minority Report is over 15 years old, and I can still reference the precrime scrubber and you know exactly what I mean. But you also need to be able to critique these pernicious things when they come up. Why is it good? Why is it not good? What do you tell your client or your design partner when they suggest it as a model for something? Note that sci-fi is the number 2 box office genre, so if you don’t know at least the big movies, you’re missing out on something that may be in the minds of your collaborators and audience, influencing how they think about and use your interfaces.
I speak about the Minority Report interface as part of the “Best and Worst Interfaces” talk, as given at the BoingBoing Ingenuity conference.
7. Its blind spots are rich mines.
Studying sci-fi and comparing it to the real world has led me to understand its blind spots, and even develop an understanding of what we need to be thinking about that it doesn’t include, that it’s not good at thinking about: agentive tech.Remember the pilot episode of Firefly? Mal climbs up on an anti-aircraft weapon to defend Serenity Valley from the horrible Alliance. The HUD shows two reticles: One where the weapon will fire, and the digital one where the bad guy is. An an audience we know what Mal’s job is: Put the two reticles together and pull the trigger. But, you have to ask, if the weapon knows where the bad guy is, why is it waiting for Mal to position it? It could do it better and more precisely than he can. We want him pulling the trigger, because that’s an ethics call, but the computer will be better at aiming.
I know I’ve spoken about this on stage, but I can’t find it. Some of my thinking of this appeared on the blog when I was reviewing a particularly dumb scene in Starship Troopers.
Coming to understand the blind spots takes a long time, since it takes a fairly exhaustive study, but hey, that’s part of why I keep a blog, so you can benefit from my nerdy work.
8. It inspires bigthinking.
If designers always work from what they know can be done with the materials they’re familiar with, I’d assert that they will only come up with incremental improvements over what’s come before. Those aren’t bad (in fact very important for usability’s sake) but we also have to keep in mind the big opportunities of disrupting an industry for the better.To inspire those, you need a way to dream big, to imagine what the thing would be like if it was just…awesome. Free of constraints. World-changing. Sci-fi is a fun and familiar framework in which to do that for technology.
The Redesigning Star Wars workshop (linked above) is great practice at using at least that diegesis as big-thinking inspiration.
Could you get these things elsewhere?
I may be biased, but I don’t think so. What other medium has us in as much of a thrall and focuses on future technology and society in such a visual and visceral way? Video games, maybe, though cut scenes are pretty much sci-fi, so kind of entailed, and the actual interfaces used by the player are subject to real-world usability forces, so won’t be the same level of Out There. But video games come close.
Practice can certainly be had against interfaces in the real world, but then you miss out on the crazy ideas sci-fi puts out there, which is half the fun.
So, no, I’d say most—not all—of this is germane to the study of sci-fi interfaces. They’re fun, instructive, important, outsider art that you can benefit greatly from studying.
And if you don’t have the time to study it, hey, I happen to keep a blog where I post the results of smart people who are. 🙂
While working on some other material this weekend, I just noticed two unusual, but similar gestures from different movies in 2015, which are gestures on the outside of spheres.
First, the Something control sphere from Tomorrowland.
And, the core memories in Inside Out.
The gestures are subtly different (Tomorrowland is full palm, Inside Out is two fingers) and their meanings are different (Tomorrowland is to shift direction of travel of the time camera, Inside Out is to scrub the time itself) but they are a nice gestural rhyme of each other.
The Inside Out image reminds me that I really, really need to do a full retrospective of interfaces in Pixar movies, because they are quite extraordinary in the aggregate.
Despite what you may think, I know how far down the Sarlacc pit this is going. I’m in the middle of The Avengers, which I interrupted for the Star Wars Holiday Special, and now we’re looking at the interfaces inside a ten-minute cartoon that Lumpy watches complacently while stormtroopers trash his home and rough up his family in the background. We’re at Inception level Hoth.
I even know I have proclaimed that I must shy away from reviewing interfaces in hand-drawn animation on principle. I know all this. But if you have yet to brave gazing into the dark heart of The Special, know that this is its highlight. The animation is gorgeous and trippy (like something out of Heavy Metal magazine circa 1980) almost making the frame story of The Special worth it. Even if the plot is a little wan.
Plot
Luke, the droids, and Leia are aboard the cruiser R.S. Revenge, anxiously awaiting word from Han and Chewie, who are racing to find a mystical talisman before the Empire does. The Millennium Falcon comes out of lightspeed barreling toward the cruiser and out of radio contact. After it zooms past, Luke takes the droids and chases the Falcon to an intensely pink moon. Luke crashes into the soupy surface, and while looking for them with binoculars, he is saved from a pink sauropod attack by Boba Fett. (Yes, that Boba Fett. This is where he is introduced in the Star Wars universe.) Fett then leads them to the Falcon.
There Luke sees Chewie eject the talisman from the ship, before falling into the same coma-like sleep as Han. Turns out the talisman is infected with a virus that only affects humans. To survive, Luke is hung upside down next to Han until they can be cured. Something something blood to the brain something. Fett offers to get a remedy in the nearby city.
After he gets the serum, Fett contacts Darth Vader (insert gasp) on a public video phone (insert gasp). Back at the ship, the Droids intercept the message, hearing that the talisman is a red herring—Fett and Vader are really trying to earn their trust to learn the location of the new Rebel base. When Fett returns to the Falcon, they inject the serum to wake Han and Luke, but the droids out Fett as the bad guy he is. Fett escapes with his jet pack, promising that they’ll meet again.
I am pleased to report that with this post, we are over 50% of the way through this wretched, wretched Holiday Special.
Description
After Lumpy tries to stop stormtroopers from going upstairs, an Imperial Officer commands Malla to keep him quiet. To do so, she does what any self-respecting mother of a pre-teen in the age of technology does, and sits him down to watch cartoons. The player is a small, yellow device that sits flat on an angled tabletop, like a writing desk.
Two small silver buttons stack vertically on the left, and an upside down plug hole strainer on the right. A video screen sits above these controls. Since no one in the rest of his family wants to hear the cartoon introduction of Boba Fett, he dons a pair of headphones, which are actually kind of stylish in that the earpieces are square and perforated, but not beveled. There are some pointless animations that start up, but then the cartoon starts and Lumpy is, in fact, quiet for the duration. So, OK, point one Malla.
Why no budding DJ has glommed onto this for an album cover is beyond me.
Analysis
We only see Lumpy press down onto the surface of the device from the far side, so it’s mostly conjecture about how the interface works. The same goes for the media. But we do know the basic needs of video: Start, stop, and volume. And a single click-stop dial could handle all that, even if kind of poorly.
We also don’t know whether the device has media inserts—like a Blu-Ray player—or is more like a television with fixed streams of ongoing content to pick from, or like a Netflix requiring a search of a practically infinite on-demand catalogue. But that sink drain thing looks like it’s meant to be a channel selector, and this was 1978, so let’s presume it was a television model with a few-year prescient Walkman personal-media bent. In fact, there’s a handle visible in the shot posted below, so let’s give this thing some credit for presaging miniaturization to the point of mobility. It must have blown some kids minds back then.
And, sure, this interface could manage the task at hand, even if it’s missing some feedback for exactly which channel is being watched, and what the current volume is or what that second click-stop dial does, or why it has an affordance for turning when Lumpy clearly pushes it.
Apology
What I’m most interested in though is the crappy, crappy production quality of the thing. While it’s easy and admittedly fun to decry this as rushed through the prop department in about 30 minutes, I’m going to use my old friend apologetics to wonder if maybe Lumpy himself put this together. Not like a science fair project, but as an off-the shelf product. Wouldn’t it be awesome to give a kid a blank box with a video screen, let him take any object he found on top of it to use as a control device? A thimble could become the on-off switch. A jack could become the channel selector. A Matchbox car could become the volume control. This would diegetically explain the dopey sink strainer, and give Lumpy an awesome opportunity to think about the affordances of the things around him and the relationships-of-parts he could use to control abstract variables like volume, power, playback speed, etc. Maybe he could even assign objects to favorite videos. This stone in that crayon circle means that video. It would be a dream to foster interaction design thinking.
Sure, you might be thinking, but this would take cameras of an eye-like quality, and perfect image recognition attached to a near general artificial intelligence. Too bad they don’t have anything like that in Star Wars, yeah?
Of course one imagines such a device might be prohibitively expensive for a smuggler’s Life Day budget, and moreover this is giving the Star Wars Holiday Special waaaaay too much credit, but these are the truffles I actually do hope to find in rooting around all this muck for you.
When Imperial troopers intrude to search the house, one of the bullying officers takes interest in a device sitting on the dining table. It’s the size of a sewing machine, with a long handle along the top. It has a set of thumb toggles along the top, like old cassette tape recorder buttons.
Saun convinces the officer to sit down, stretches the thin script with a bunch of pointless fiddling of a volume slider and pantomimed delays, and at last fumbles the front of the device open. Hinged at the bottom like a drawbridge, it exposes a small black velvet display space. Understandably exasperated, the officer stands up to shout, “Will you get on with it?” Saun presses a button on the opened panel, and the searing chord of an electric guitar can be heard at once.
Inside the drawbridge-space a spot of pink light begins to glow, and mesmerized officer who, moments ago was bent on brute intimidation, but now spends the next five minutes and 23 seconds grinning dopily at the volumetric performance by Jefferson Starship.
During the performance, 6 lights link in a pattern in the upper right hand corner of the display. When the song finishes, the device goes silent. No other interactions are seen with it.
Many questions. Why is there a whole set of buttons to open the thing? Is this the only thing it can play? If not, how do you select another performance?Is it those unused buttons on the top? Why are the buttons unlabeled? Is Jefferson Starship immortal? How is it that they have only aged in the long, long time since this was recorded? Or was this volumetric recording somehow sent back in time? Where is the button that Saun pressed to start the playback? If there was no button, and it was the entire front panel, why doesn’t it turn on and off while the officer taps (see above)? What do the little lights do other than distract? Why is the glow pink rather than Star-Wars-standard blue? Since volumetric projections are most often free-floating, why does this appear in a lunchbox? Since there already exists ubiquitous display screens, why would anyone haul this thing around? How does this officer keep his job?
Perhaps it’s best that these questions remain unanswered. For if anything were substantially different, we would risk losing this image, of the silhouette of the lead singer and his microphone. Humanity would be the poorer for it.
With the salacious introduction, “Itchy, I know what you’d like,” Saun Dann reveals himself as a peddler of not just booby trapped curling irons, but also softcore erotica! The Life Day gift he gives to the old Wookie is a sexy music video for his immersive media chair.
The chair sits in the family living room, and has a sort of helmet fixed in place such that Itchy can sit down and rest his head within it. On the outside of the helmet are lights that continuously blink out of sync with each other and seem unrelated to the actual function of the chair. Maybe a fairy-lights power indicator?
Saun first powers the device by inserting a “proton pack” into the back of the chair. This is kind of strange since none of the other devices seen in the home require batteries or charging. Are they lower power so batteries last longer? Is there an unseen electrical infrastructure but that monitors any plugged in object for illegal-device signatures? Whatever the reason, the battery pack plugs in and the chair comes to life.
When Itchy sits down, he rests his head in the helmet, and Saun puts a media cartridge into a tray sticking out of the armrest. There is a single red button on the forward edge. He then engages the cartridge by slapping it on edge so the tray slides into a recess. Then he lowers the forehead plate of the helmet over Itchy, who sits back to enjoy the show. Saun wishes him, “Happy Life Day!” and then with a nudge-nudge-wink-wink-you-know-seeeeexxxxx tone in his voice, leans in to reiterate, “And I do mean Happy Life Day!”
Itchy punches the top of the armrest with his hairy finger, and the media plays, full of theremin meanderings, stage lights and spandex dancers shot through a kaleidoscope-refraction lens, and a scantily-feathered singer (IMDB tells me the character name is Mermeia Holographic Wow, played by the diva Diahann Carroll) who purrs out a full 5 minutes of mind-numbing introduction before a 4-minute musical number. You can almost hear the director saying over a soggily-chewed stogie, “Sorry, Diahann, but we don’t have a lot to work with, here, you’re really going to have to stretch this out.”
I know you’re searching for me Searching Searching I am here My voice is for you alone I am found in your eyes only I exist for you I am in your mind As you create me Oh yes I can feel my creation {Giggle} I’m getting your message Are you getting mine?
Itchy growls and spasms in his chair enthusiastically.
Oh, oh! We are excited aren’t we? Well just relax Just relax Yes
{More Itchy grunting}
Now We can have a good time Can’t we?
{spasming, panting}
I’ll tell you a secret I find you adorable
Itchy loves this assertion so much that he punches a control on the armrest, and the playback jumps back to replay the line again. And again. And again. Four times in total.
(I find you adorable) (I find you adorable) (I find you adorable) I don’t need to ask how you found me You see, I am your fantasy I am your experience So experience me I am your pleasure So enjoy me This is our moment together in time That we might turn this moment an eternity
{Music mercifully begins}
I’m sorry to have to remind people about this low point in your career, Diahann.
So…Exactly what is this machine?
So, if the words of the recording are to be believed, this machine automatically reads the mind (or stored preferences) of its user to create a custom, on-the-fly immersive video.
Here you should note that Itchy’s species of sexual preference is human, not Wookie, and then note with sadness that Chewie is not mixed-species. Itchy is living an unfulfilled life.
If it constructs its visions on-the-fly, then what is the cartridge for? It can’t be Itchy’s preferences. Why would Saun have them? My best guess is that the cartridge contains the template of the song, This Minute Now, and the device reads the wearer’s in-the-moment preferences to pick the avatar that sings it. That template isn’t neutral, though. It has to be a sexy template, because Saun does all the nod’s as good as a wink to a blind bat routine. Aww, yeah, sexy template for Life Day.
Knowing that this might be a privately-observed sexytime moment, I’d recommend the designers add a curtain or perhaps situate the chair inside a private chamber to make the user less exposed. Otherwise it might be awkward—for a human user at least—for other members of the family to observe him becoming visibly and audibly aroused (the panting), much less do…uh…anything about it. Of course I don’t know Wookie social rules, so this might be well within their social norms. Kinda makes you wonder about how Chewie spends his idle time on the Falcon in front of Han. “Chewie. Do you mind? Take it into your berth!”
Controls
The instant replay feature is useful to the task. And it’s quite well executed, since it’s a quick-to-press button to replay the last moment, and that moment is of unspecified length. The media must have very sophisticated and detailed markup for a “repeat that bit” to work, and it does. Of course, it also can read Itchy’s mind, so maybe it just knows to play across the most-recent high-excitement part. It’s a self-administered dopamine hit.
A better tool might monitor the user’s brainwaves for a perfect combination of tension and release to ensure a perfectly satisfying experience. No button needed. That would also alleviate the problem that the user’s hand might be otherwise engaged during the exciting part to try and target a button. The (prolly NSFW text, even if it’s WebMD) sexual response cycle of humans is a known thing, so surely a Wookie’s is too. Let me disturb you by visualizing the combination of concepts so implied.
But we also have to ask after the placement and purpose of that sole red button. Saun slapped the cartridge edge-on to lodge the tray in place. But that’s where the button is. Did the lodging activate the play, or did pressing the button?
If the cartridge, what does the button do? (Not replay, Itchy clearly presses the top of the armrest for that.) And how does it avoid accidental activation while being slapped in?
If the button, why have the tray slide in and out? To keep it private? Sorry, you lost that battle with the living room masturbatorium. To protect the media? Then why have it in the armrest where it’s sure to be subject to the bangings of Wookie demands for again!?
With the commercial release of Oculus Rift just about to ship post-CES, let’s not turn to this device for any immersive-media lessons. There is better blind-use masturbation VR in Strange Days, more dystopic ones in THX-1138 (yes, I now realize, it’s a recurring Lucas theme), more private ones in Sleeper, and less creepy things almost anywhere you turn.
Let’s just let Itchy have his personalized-avatar, happy Life Day, there, in the middle of the astroturfed family room.
