You know what drives me absolutely nuts after forty years in aerospace? Watching Hollywood aliens make terrible tactical decisions. I mean, here I am – spent my whole career designing actual spacecraft, worked on satellite propulsion systems that had to function in the real vacuum of space – and I’m watching these supposedly advanced civilizations pick Earth as their invasion target. It’s like watching someone with a PhD in astrophysics choose to vacation in Newark.
I was at DragonCon a few years back (my wife insists these conventions are my “midlife crisis,” but at 68 I think I’m past that stage), sitting in on a panel about alien invasion movies. The moderator asked why aliens always seem to want Earth, and this kid – couldn’t have been more than twenty – raises his hand and says “because we’re special.” Special? Kid, I’ve looked at the actual data from our deep space surveys. There are potentially billions of habitable planets out there, and most of them don’t come with the baggage of seven billion argumentative primates who can’t agree on whether pineapple belongs on pizza.
Take Independence Day – please, take it far away from me. I remember watching that thing in theaters and nearly walking out when Jeff Goldblum uploaded a virus to an alien mothership using his PowerBook. Look, I’ve worked with spacecraft computers my entire career, and let me tell you, getting two Earth-based systems to talk to each other is hard enough. The idea that an alien civilization advanced enough for interstellar travel would somehow have USB compatibility with 1990s Apple hardware? That’s not science fiction, that’s science fantasy with delusions of grandeur.
But the real kicker is their motivation: they want our resources. Our resources! Earth, this little blue marble that’s already been strip-mined by humans for centuries, where we’re running out of clean water and fighting wars over oil deposits. Any alien species capable of crossing interstellar distances has obviously figured out fusion power, probably antimatter drives, maybe even zero-point energy extraction. They’re looking at Earth like it’s some kind of cosmic Walmart when they’ve got the technological equivalent of Amazon Prime delivering whatever they need from asteroid belts and gas giant atmospheres.
I actually did some back-of-the-envelope calculations once (yeah, I know, typical engineer behavior). Just in our solar system, there’s more water ice on Europa than in all of Earth’s oceans. More metals in the asteroid belt than we’ve mined in human history. And that’s just our neighborhood. These aliens supposedly traveled light-years to get here – they passed dozens of solar systems on the way, probably thousands of resource-rich worlds, and they pick the one with an active biosphere and a species that’s figured out nuclear weapons but not how to stop arguing about climate change.
The whole thing reminds me of the debates we used to have during coffee breaks at Lockheed. We’d be designing real spacecraft – vehicles that had to work in actual space, deal with real physics, survive actual radiation and micrometeorites – and then we’d go home and watch Star Trek where they’re flying around at ten times the speed of light having philosophical discussions. Don’t get me wrong, I love good science fiction, but there’s a difference between bending the rules creatively and just ignoring them completely.
War of the Worlds is probably the most honest about the whole thing, in a backwards way. Wells at least gave his Martians a reason to leave their dying planet, though having them defeated by Earth bacteria was… well, it worked for 1898, but any species advanced enough for interplanetary warfare would’ve figured out basic microbiology. That’d be like NASA sending astronauts to the Moon without checking if they could breathe the atmosphere first. Actually, worse – we’ve known about germs for centuries before we went to space.
I had this argument with a film critic at a convention panel a couple years ago – guy kept insisting that these movies aren’t really about the science, they’re about human drama and social commentary. Fair enough, but you can have good social commentary without making your aliens complete idiots. Look at The Day the Earth Stood Still – the original, not the Keanu Reeves version that somehow made even less sense. At least Klaatu had a reasonable motivation: stop the violent humans before they spread beyond Earth and become a galactic problem. That’s pragmatic alien thinking. But most invasion movies? It’s like watching someone break into a house to steal the furniture while ignoring the jewelry box sitting right there on the dresser.
The humanoid problem bugs me too – spent too many years thinking about what actual alien biology might look like to accept that every species in the galaxy evolved into basically humans with slightly different foreheads. I mean, look at the diversity of life just on Earth, and we’re all working from the same basic DNA template. Aliens that evolved on completely different worlds, under different selection pressures, with different atmospheric compositions and gravity levels… they’d probably be so alien we couldn’t even recognize them as life forms initially.
But Hollywood aliens always conveniently have two arms, two legs, and motivations we can understand. They want our women (Species), our water (Battle: Los Angeles), our planet (Independence Day), or they just want to eat us (A Quiet Place). Real aliens – if they exist and if they ever showed up here – would probably have motivations so foreign to human thinking that we wouldn’t even recognize them as motivations. Maybe they collect planets with prime numbers of moons. Maybe they’re art critics touring the galaxy rating different species’ architecture. Maybe they’re cosmic real estate developers and Earth is in the way of their new hyperspace bypass.
A Quiet Place really got under my skin because the premise is just so… inefficient. These aliens have super-sensitive hearing and they invade a planet that’s essentially one giant noise machine. Earth is loud. We’ve got oceans crashing against shores, weather systems, geological activity, not to mention seven billion humans who won’t shut up. If you’re hunting by sound, there are probably countless quieter worlds out there. Dead worlds. Worlds with thinner atmospheres where sound doesn’t travel as well. But no, they come to the planet where teenagers play music too loud and New York City exists.
The water thing in Battle: Los Angeles was particularly maddening because I’d just finished reading about the Cassini mission data from Saturn’s moons. Europa, Enceladus, Ganymede – these places have more water than Earth, and it’s cleaner water without all the dissolved salts and pollutants and microscopic life that would probably be toxic to aliens anyway. But apparently these interstellar conquistadors decided to skip the clean, easily accessible water ice and come fight the U.S. Marines for the privilege of dealing with Earth’s water table. Makes perfect tactical sense if you’re a complete moron.
My wife thinks I take this stuff too seriously – she’s probably right. But I spent four decades working on actual space technology, thinking about the real challenges of operating in space, the genuine physics constraints, the enormous energies required just to get from one planet to another in the same solar system. When I see movies where aliens casually hop between star systems to invade planets that don’t make strategic sense, it’s like watching someone use a Formula One race car to deliver pizza. The technology gap is all wrong.
The real issue isn’t the science – though that bugs me plenty – it’s what these movies say about human psychology. We can’t imagine aliens that aren’t interested in us. Every invasion movie assumes Earth is somehow special, that we’re worth the enormous expense and effort of interstellar conquest. It’s cosmic narcissism on a planetary scale. We’re like that neighbor who thinks everyone’s jealous of their brown lawn and chainlink fence.
If real aliens ever do show up, they’ll probably take one look at our global politics, our environmental track record, and our social media platforms, then immediately jump back in their ships and go find a nice quiet planet somewhere else. Maybe one with better WiFi and fewer conspiracy theorists. Earth would be like that restaurant with one star on Yelp – you don’t go there unless you’re really desperate or really lost.
But I guess that doesn’t make for exciting summer blockbusters. “Aliens Arrive, Immediately Leave for Better Planet” doesn’t have the same ring to it as “Independence Day.” Though honestly, after watching enough of these invasion movies, I’m starting to think the aliens might be doing us a favor by providing a common enemy. At least when we’re fighting off interstellar invaders, we’re not arguing about whether the Earth is flat.
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