Sci- fi review

I watched “The Day the Earth Stood Still” yesterday, and I was pleasantly surprised. Sci-fi generally is really cool for IR geeks because it often takes some of our favourite topics (destructive weapons, first encounters, environmental catastrophe, weird political systems, etc) and pushes them beyond our conventional limits. The first of Asimov’s Foundation series is perhaps the best example of this. I don’t really want to bitch about Keanu Reeves (is he always trying to be stoic, or does he not understand the script?), who just does his normal Keanu thing, nor do I want to pick out everything the film got wrong (if you want that, go here). The point of most movies, and probably all science fiction movies, is to show possibility rather than actuality. Still, this movie got some things right and left me with a couple of questions. I’m not going to bother flagging what might spoil the movie for you, so if you haven’t watched it and want to, stop now.

1. The first thing that grabbed me is the alien technology. We tend to build things in a nice linear fashion, like good little engineers. We know exactly how the wheels will turn because of how we affixed them to the axle, which is affixed to the drive shaft, which is affixed to the transmission, which is… It’s all “knee-bone connected to the shin-bone”: sequential, predictable, but difficult to scale beyond a certain level of complexity. The aliens in the movie, however, use technology based on cellular automata: it’s based on very small pieces that reproduce themselves and combine unpredictably to produce the desired results. The alien’s space suit is a biological mass grown over his body. The giant robot-centurion-thing can fragment into little nano-bots that will reproduce themselves and attack (mostly inorganic) stuff. Building working technology that operates on complexity rather than linear, one-thing-after-another principles, can be tricky to control but easy enough to design, and it would offer a lot of other benefits, like being able to respond to unanticipated events. Some would say that we’re just getting started with this kind of technology, pointing to the difference between, say, Encyclopaedia Britannica (composed linearly) to Wikipedia (more like swarm intelligence). I’d say that we’ve been using it for a long time inadvertently with market mechanisms determining the allocation of resources among us, but I do think that super-intelligent aliens would be more likely to use complexity than linearity for many purposes. Kudos screenwriters.

2. The aliens seem to have a kind of Gaia-hypothesis, but they seem to apply it to the universe as a whole. This is evident when the alien says he wants to save the Earth (independent of the humans on it), that life-supporting planets are rare and need to be preserved, and especially when he says (cornily) at the kid’s grave that “nothing in the universe ever dies… it is only transformed” (though he did say the other alien who had been here longer would die). In any event, this idea can be expressed intelligently, and I’m going to assume that the aliens’ understanding wasn’t one of the atavistic ideas that the only way to be ecologically aware is to live according to the principles of some esoteric, apocryphal ‘Earth Mother’ or some such nonsense. If they have such an ontology, though, it would be hard to justify destroying humanity. Kind of like with the complex, non-linear technology, you don’t know what will become of us because humanity doesn’t move in straight lines, much to the dismay of historical materialists. By analogy, if you wanted to reclaim some farmland and make it wild again, it wouldn’t do to just plant a few saplings, wait a few days, and then uproot the saplings and give up because the process wasn’t going in the desired direction. The aliens seem to understand the benefits of creative destruction, but they seem oddly confident about their abilities to induce and direct it.

3. Okay, so the aliens wanted to destroy humanity because we’re ruining the planet, they start the process, kill a whackload of us, but Jennifer Connelly and son of the Fresh Prince manage to convince them to change their minds just before it’s too late. How are we as a society supposed to deal with that? After other genocidal rampages, truth and reconciliation commissions are set up, we have trials, or the victors make the vanquished pay. We don’t have the power to compel the aliens to agree to any of this, and I’m not sure what measures would redress our legitimate grievances (‘You made a mistake? You kill a third of humanity, and you think that ‘my bad’ or ‘oops’ makes it all go away?’). But we would have to come to some agreement, because we would still depend on the aliens not to destroy us while we figure out how to go carbon-neutral. How do you bury that hatchet?

Fun flick. Didn’t change my life, but it was a pleasant distraction for 90 minutes. (Kudos too for making a 90 minute movie. They seem to have been out of style for a while and were sadly missed.)

State of constant revolution

Lexington, the editorial section about the US in the Economist, wrote an article last week about the paranoia in American politics (@ AF1: maybe something for grandpa?). They do a decent job of describing the problem phenomena, but they make no attempt to analyze its causes. Let me synthesize what I’ve heard.

When I was a grad student in London (the English one), one of my professors said that America has never really gotten over its revolutionary mentality. Revolutionary governments often (justifiably) fear incursion by foreigners who preferred the ancien regime, and this often makes them paranoid and likely to lash out. Think revolutionary France (pick one, actually), early Bolshevik Russia, Cuba, and in some places, like Iran and North Korea, this revolutionary defensiveness against foreign incursion is practically official ideology.

I never really bought this in America’s case because a) it’s been quite a while since they faced a credible threat of foreign invasion, b) I don’t think many Americans honestly think very much about foreign invasion and c) America has had long periods of relative isolationism. It does make certain amount of sense, though, applied to the States from the inside. Many people do seem terrified that their government has been hijacked somehow by people hell-bent on ruining their ‘more perfect union’ (sic). This isn’t new, either. It seems to be a recurring theme.

So far, this is just reframing the Economist’s description without providing any of my own explanation. My hare-brained theory, though, has to do with a naive image of god and imposing this image where it doesn’t belong. Think about it. Americans speak of their ‘founding fathers’ as if the guys were immaculately conceived. Watch some videos of health care town halls and people ranting about the constitution to get a sense of what I mean. Given that 45% of Americans are young Earth creationists, they must have a very paternalistic and personal view of god. He’s like Geppetto, tinkering away in a workshop for our benefit. They don’t seem to think any less of their founding fathers, ignoring that they were also men of flesh and blood, fallible, political, and vain. Since the first Canadian prime minister once puked in parliament because he was too drunk, we might have a more realistic view of our all too human beginnings as a state.

So I think there might be a swath of Americans worried that their current leaders, whose humanity is obvious by their drinking (GWB), philandering (WJC), smoking (BHO), and admitted drug use (all three) think that the former state of grace and perfection (Eden) has been overtaken by a bunch of frat boys.

I’d love to hear alternative explantions.