Month: June 2008

Want to know why Nick Bostrom is “hoping that our space probes will discover dead rocks and lifeless sands on Mars, on Jupiter’s moon Europa, and everywhere else our astronomers look”? Well then, read on.

It’s an interesting idea, this Great Filter (or what Chris McLaren, who posted about this way back in May, calls the “Doom Constant”), and it’s one full of scary implications for the survival of the human species. Bostrom suggests that if the emergence of intelligent life in the universe is not itself a rare event, then we surely have to wonder why none of it has been in contact with us. Is there a cataclysmic event waiting to kill off all advanced species, or have we already crossed that threshold and beaten the odds?

As McLaren notes, Bostrom “never gets near the possibility that the ‘Great Filter’ might actually be intelligent, outside action, rather than a self-destructive tendency.” (Having recently read Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space, I can totally get behind that idea.) But he also doesn’t get too close to the possibility that maybe advanced alien cultures have been in contact — not through alien abduction or even radio waves, but in exactly what Bostrom calls the likeliest method of space colonization.

“Even if [the aliens] failed a thousand times before they succeeded,” he writes, “they still could have arrived here hundreds of millions of years ago.”

My question is this: how do we know they didn’t? If “so-called von Neumann probes” indeed are the most likely means of colonizing other planets, how do we know they didn’t already colonize Earth? Maybe some species here — maybe humans, maybe even all life — is a direct descendant of that first probe.

Granted, this kind of exogenesis might not factor into Bostrom’s thinking at all, even if there was anything like credible evidence to support it. Regardless of where life on this planet began, the probability, one way or another of it, ending is of definite concern. But as a fan of science fiction, as someone who can’t help but wonder the “what if,” it’s an interesting thought.

And when you add in this (via Warren Ellis)…

Molecular “robots” have been developed by chemists to explore the unmapped chemical environments of living cells and transmit back the results.

…well, it just opens up all sorts of interesting scenarios…

Cherie Priest on Alien‘s Ellen Ripley:

It’s noteworthy to me that she’s not the captain. She’s not a princess. She’s not a mutant, a witch, or a vampire — and though any given one of these things is fine and dandy, it resonates with me that she’s not anybody special. Third in a chain of command that numbers merely seven, Ripley is resented for what little authority she wields and ignored when it serves the purposes of other crew members. She isn’t a force of personality or innate power. She’s not anyone’s romantic partner. She’s just some woman who happens to be on board when the shit hits the fan.

And she’s no spontaneous ass-kicking warrior.

She screws up a lot.

She takes the wrong tunnels, makes some wrong guesses, and loses her shit more than once — but she pulls her shit together, that’s the important thing. It’s okay to make mistakes, teaches Ripley, as long as you don’t let your failures paralyze you. It’s okay to be a compassionate survivor, and go out of your way to save the ones you can even when it isn’t particularly practical. It is fair and reasonable to cut your losses when no good can come of trying to salvage them. Pray if you think it helps, but don’t bet on rescue; because when the sun comes up on the distant planetoid and there’s an acid-blooded killing machine stalking through your galley, the time has come to rescue your own goddamned self.

And you know what? You can. You don’t have to be a fairy queen or a superhero; you can be just some woman who’s there at the wrong place, in the wrong time — and it doesn’t have to be the end of the world.

Creator Chris Carter discusses The X-Files with the AV Club:

Russell T. Davies gets a lot of flak sometimes — not all of it undeserved — but the man can still knock one out of the park when he sets his mind to it. This might also have been Catherine Tate’s best work on the show to date. We’ll see if the two-parter that ends the season — and Davies’ run as head writer and showrunner — can deliver the goods as well.