[MINOR SPOILER ALERT]

Wow.  Bleak.  Maybe I shouldn’t have watched all five episodes in one afternoon, but I haven’t been this depressed since Dark Knight.  What happened to the randy, swashbuckling Captain Jack that we loved?

On the SciNoFi front though, Torchwood gives us the opportunity to revisit the topic of eyeball spy cameras, last seen in an episode of Dollhouse this spring.  As Stephen noted in a post at that time, scientists have been working on plugging directly into the brain (in cats at least) to locate and interpret visual processing activity.

Interestingly, the Torchwood contact lenses appeared to be a much more basic technology: essentially small video cameras that could transmit images back to a laptop and also display text messages to the wearer.

Given how far we have to go in understanding the brain, a contact lens camera is probably a more straightforward and only marginally more detectable solution for this kind of surveillance.  Eyeball sized cameras are already commercially available.

My heroes are in a first-contact situation, meeting an alien face-to-face for the first time. How could my heroes and the alien learn to communicate with each other?
Both knowingly and unwittingly, humans have been broadcasting their presence to the Universe since the 1920s—when coherent transmissions in the radio portion of the electromagnetic spectrum became widespread. Our radio and television broadcasts do not stop at the edge of Earth’s atmosphere; rather they propagate into space at the speed of light. While these signals attenuate with distance, they are detectable nevertheless: NASA still regularly communicates with the twin Voyager spacecraft despite the fact that they are over 100 times further from the Sun than Earth and that each of which transmit data to Earth with less power than a common household light bulb. This means that an alien civilization as far away as 58 light-years could potentially be trying to make sense of “Lucy, you’ve got some ‘splainin’ to do!” (There are 105 G-type stars—ones like our own lovable Sol—within this I Love Lucy-sphere.)

Thirty-five years ago humans make the first and only significant attempt to say “Hello” to extraterrestrial civilizations. On November 16, 1974 the newly remodeled Arecibo radio telescope beamed a message into space. The signal was beamed into space only once, and it was aimed in the direction of the globular cluster M13, a collection of hundreds of thousands of stars 25,000 light-years away in the constellation Hercules. Because of proper motion, M13 will no longer be in position to receive that message 25,000 years from now, but another star system might.

The Arecibo message was beamed into space less because it was a legitimate attempt to make contact with an extraterrestrial civilization, and more as a test of new capabilities of the telescope. The message was 1679 bits of binary information. Presumably any alien species capable of telecommunication would figure out that 1679 is the product of 73 and 23, both of which are prime numbers, hinting at the intended interpretation of the broadcast: that it is actually is a matrix with 73 rows and 23 columns. One assumption behind the message is that any alien race receiving it will orient the matrix vertically instead of horizontally (23 by 73), which produces gibberish—or at least that they’ll examine both representations before giving up on it.

Contained in the Arecibo transmission are representations of the numbers one through ten in binary; the atomic numbers of the elements that form organic compounds which, in turn, form human beings; formulae of a few basic organic compounds; and graphical representations of a human, the Solar System, and the Arecibo antenna. All of the depictions were crude, at best. Even the binary digits one through ten were represented in such a way as to be non-obvious even to human beings familiar with binary. If an alien race actually receives that transmission, it will be easy to determine that it is of intelligent origin (omitting the obligatory gag about Earth not having intelligent life), but challenging to determine the actual intent of the message. The Arecibo message was unique: Although our radio and TV broadcasts “leak” into space, nobody is actively broadcasting signals with the idea of contacting extraterrestrial civilizations. Today we simply listen.

What if somebody responded?
What if one day aliens received a signal that we had transmitted into space, intentionally or otherwise? What if they decided to invite themselves over for a visit? What if they decided not to land on the front lawn of the White House, instead landing on the front lawn of your house? Assuming that the aliens did not know your language, how would you attempt communication? Should you attempt communication?

In movies and on television first contact scenarios often seem so… easy. That’s usually, at least in part, because the heroes in science fiction stories have access to some device that functions as a universal translator—that translates between most known (and previously unknown) languages. Even if the translator is of biological origin like a fish (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) or a colony of bacteria (Farscape), it’s still a device—a plot device that we generally accept in sci-fi like FTL travel or artificial gravity. It makes sense from a storytelling standpoint.

In an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Captain Picard must learn to communicate with the captain of an alien vessel who speaks entirely in cultural references. While this can be compelling for a lone episode, in series like Star Trek or Stargate it would be dramatically unfulfilling if we had to wait, week after week, while our heroes attempt to communicate with yet another new alien race.

It’s an obvious understatement to say that language is complex—what is startling is how difficult it is to convey even the most basic of concepts to somebody with no known reference points. Everything that you say is fraught with assumptions. Imagine that you walk up to a random stranger on a street corner and say, “Hello. How are you?” What assumption could lie behind such an innocuous greeting? Perhaps it’s more obvious if we rephrase the question. If you walked up to the very same person and said, “Guten Tag. Wie geht’s?” You have made the obvious assumption that the person speaks German which may or may not be a good one. The assumption that other humans with whom we’d like to communicate have shared experiences is a good one. With an alien race, it is not an assumption you can make.

It gets worse. Most language has cultural colloquialisms that make accurate translation even more difficult. Even though a universal translator might function well on a word-by-word basis, it’s still doubtful that meaningful dialogue between humans and alien races would rapidly ensue when we consider even the most common cultural influences upon language. For example if somebody who spoke German as a native language spoke into a universal translator and said, “Er is sehr blau” in reference to your mutual friend, you may think that your friend is feeling depressed—the literal translation is “He is very blue.” You wouldn’t figure out, other than perhaps by visual observation, that your mutual friend is drunk, which was the actual implication of the statement in German. “Blue” means depressed in English, inebriated in German, and in neither case would the connotation of that sentence be, “He is reflecting short-wavelength visible light.”

When the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft were launched in 1972 and 1973, they carried human greetings to any alien civilization who may find the craft one day. Each craft carries a plaque that has diagrams of, among other things, a human male and female, the Solar System, and the spacecraft’s origin. The man has his hand raised in what is supposed to be a friendly gesture, but even this has a cultural bias. It could equally be interpreted as hostile: “You want a piece of this? Come to my planet and I’m going to slap you senseless.” In fact, one argument against affixing the plaques to the Pioneer spacecraft was that it sends the very clear message, “Here are the directions to the restaurant, and here’s what’s on the menu.”

Which brings us back to the spacecraft sitting in your front yard, and the alien beings who have exited the craft and who are now standing before you. If Earth’s history can be used as a template, first-contact scenarios between cultures possessing drastically different levels of technology often end badly for those in the low-tech population. It would, however, probably be reasonable to assume that if the aliens wanted you for dinner, you’d already be in their oven. Or on their plate. Or in their equivalent of a stomach. If they wanted you as slave labor, given the proximity, it’s probably too late for you on that score as well. Nevertheless, the first goal in any such encounter should be, first and foremost, your survival. It might be a good assumption that the aliens are on a heightened state of alert—that they are wary of what you may do simply out of a fear response. Waving “Hello” like the man on the Pioneer plaque is perhaps not a wise move. Slowly turning your hands so that your open palms face the aliens might be a better choice. Presumably if the aliens can get all the way to Earth from their home, they are intelligent enough to look beyond any cultural insult this gesture may cause, and recognize that what you mean is that you are not carrying a weapon. Making all motions and gestures slow and deliberate would not be a bad idea.

If the aliens did, in fact, wish to achieve any meaningful dialogue, the goal in any interplanetary communications, then, would be to find a common ground with a minimum of assumptions and colloquialisms. Whether or not this is an attainable goal is another question. If the situation were reversed, and it was human beings who had just landed at an alien being’s home, presumably we would have done our homework first—doing either remote or in situ observations to smooth over a first-contact scenario. They may have also have experience, having done this once or twice before. So the best communication strategy might simply be to let the culture with the highest level of technology take the lead while the low-tech participants concentrate on staying alive. In the end, it’s probably best to let the alien initiate communication, even if it is simply, “Take me to your leader.”

What is the most likely form an alien would take?
Life’s architecture is difficult to predict because it depends on many factors involving the interaction of the environment and life through evolution and natural selection. We can, however, make some generalizations based on the vast number of morphological forms that life takes on earth.

Life on earth ranges from microscopic spheres and rods to macroscopic creatures exhibiting wide variations in their morphologies (e.g., spiders to humans). Nevertheless, nearly all life (everything except sponges) exhibits symmetry—either bilateral or radial symmetry. In bilateral symmetry (also called plane symmetry), only one plane, called the sagittal plane, will divide an organism into roughly mirror image halves. An organism with radial symmetry has no left or right sides, only a top and a bottom (dorsal and ventral surface). An alien life form, therefore, would most likely be symmetrical. The type of symmetry would be influenced on the environment in which it lived. From our basic knowledge of survival of macroscopic organisms whether they be aquatic or terrestrial it seems that bilateral symmetry dominates.

The possession of other specific attributes (e.g., ability to hear, see, smell, move, etc.) depends on the environment and competition for resources for survival. For example, when we think of “seeing,” we think of “eyes” first. But if we think of the function (sensing specific wavelengths of light) rather than the specific physical attribute, it opens a plethora of ways in which we can imagine “seeing,” ranging from the photosensors for phototaxis in bacteria to the compound eyes of some insects. The uses to which life puts its sensory perception mechanism of light ranges from finding food to escaping from predators. It would seem logical that an alien would have some type of light sensory perception mechanism if it lived on the surface of a planet. What the physical make-up and appearance of that light sensory perception mechanism would be is difficult to define. The perception of light is not just limited to the type of perception just described, that is, “seeing”, but also to perception by photopigments (e.g., chlorophylls) used for capturing light energy to produce cellular energy for use by the organism (i.e., photosynthesis).

Following this line of logic, the form that an alien would take is the form that makes it survive and reproduce best in its environment. If I had to make a guess it would be that it would have symmetry (probably bilateral symmetry), capable of light perception, and probably motile (increases chances of finding nutrients and escaping predators). To say anything more specific would require knowing the planetary environment in which it lived.

What about the form of an intelligent alien, specifically? Would it even need to have a solid form?
First, what is intelligence? As defined by H. J. Jerison, intelligence is the behavioral consequence of the total neural-information processing capacity in representative adults of a species, adjusted for the capacity to control routine bodily functions. This can be related to encephalization. Encephalization is defined as the amount of brain mass exceeding that related to an animal’s total body mass. Quantifying encephalization has been argued to be directly related to that animal’s level of intelligence. Brain-to-body mass ratio (also known as the encephalization quotient, or EQ) is a rough estimate of the possible intelligence of an organism, and is defined as the ratio of the actual brain mass to the expected brain mass of a typical organism that size. On average, the larger an organism is, the more brain mass is required for basic survival tasks, such as breathing and thermoregulation. Therefore, the larger the brain relative to the body, the more brain mass should be available for more complex cognitive tasks. It has been shown that dolphins, which have the highest brain-to-body mass ratio of all cetaceans, are able to communicate with each other and are thought to be intelligent to some degree. Humans have a higher brain-to-body mass ratio than dolphins.

To this day there is no broadly definition of “life”. The Darwinian, or genetic, definition of life is the most accepted today. It holds that life is self-sustained chemical system capable of undergoing evolution by natural selection. Applying this definition to life suggests that it would be a solid form.

Moderator Faith Salie introduced the panelists: Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University; Michael Hogan, also known as Colonel Saul Tigh; Hod Lipson, director of the Computational Synthesis group at Cornell University; Mary McDonnell, a.k.a. President Laura Roslin; and Kevin Warwick, professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading in England.

Salie asked each panelist to define what a cyborg is. Everyone had different answers: Warwick said it’s something that is part human, Lipson said it’s a moving target or a physical device that takes on biological life, and Bostrom said it’s the essence of human intelligence.

When asked about what research the stars had to do prior to playing their role, Hogan said researching how to be a robot for the part was more about understanding mental illness. “I had irritable shell shock, chronic pain, and was not well–off balance. Lots of people in the world are in chronic pain,” he said.

McDonnell weighed in after experiencing the world of cybernetics for herself through her role in the show: “If we can find a way to use parts of the brain that are dormant, more creative, and less fearful—I would like to be more efficient, more active..”

Warwick, whose research, as well as Lipson’s, served as inspiration for the show, explained how he was creating a biological brain in a petri dish. By applying an external voltage to the dish, he was able to create brain activity. Lipson had a different approach: He tried to breed the robots instead of designing them from scratch. When he showed a short video clip of it, Salie remarked, “It looks like a drunk starfish.”

Warwick said the robots developed in the military right now are designed to destroy humans. “We are now pushing things to act quite negatively towards humans,” he says.

The thought of upgrading our brain is appealing for a number of reasons—or, at least, Warwick thought so, since he had a chip surgically implanted in his brain to link him directly to the Internet. One thing he experienced was the touch of a robot picking up something. “It felt like a hand applying force,” he said. He even had a special necklace made for his wife that was hooked up to his brain, and it lit up to show his mood.

And Bostrom left us with something interesting to chew on: When robot AI reaches the complexity of the human brain, robots should be treated the same as humans, whether or they are based carbon or silicon atoms.

Image: Flickr /Courtesy of the World Science Festival

Meta-conspiracy: Does the government want you to believe in UFO’s? [via Futurismic]

Real-life Terminator robots here, here and here.  [via Technovelgy]

Video of low-altitude flight over the lunar surface by the Japanese KAGUYA explorer [via Pink Tentacle]

Recently released scenes of the upcoming remake of V combine two of our favorite things: creepy aliens and Party of Five! [via thrfeed]

Would/will we recognize an alien transmission right away? Is there a chance we could miss such a transmission, or they ours?

We will recognize the sorts of electromagnetic signals for which we have built good matched filters: nanosecond optical laser pulses, narrowband radio continuous wave or pulsed signals. If signals are of some other type (e.g., a modulation scheme with higher dimensionality, or something other than electromagnetic waves) then we will not detect them, except by serendipity as we build new instruments to study our universe in different ways, or by using increasing computational power to look for more complex types of electromagnetic signals.

If signals are transmitted via a technology that we haven’t yet invented, we will miss them until we manage to invent the appropriate technology (remember that we are a very young technology (~100 years) in a very old galaxy (~10 billion years). I suspect we have a lot more to learn.

We could also miss signals in time. If technological civilizations and their signals are short lived, we might be searching for exactly the right thing, but long after the signals have come and gone. Likewise, if we do not manage to continue as a technological civilization for a very long time, then any transmission project that we might decide to embark on would have little likelihood of being detected by anyone else.

I continually tell groups containing grad students and post-docs (who touch more data than the rest of us) to resist the temptation to edit out anomalies until they have first satisfied themselves that it isn’t a real effect, perhaps the artifact of someone else’s astroengineering or signaling project—but in truth, it’s very hard to train someone to be a Jocelyn Bell [who discovered pulsars as a post-doc].

There’s no way to estimate what we might be missing.

Will we understand alien communication, and vice versa?

People argue that mathematics is essential for a technology that can create and operate some sort of transmitter. Therefore a language based on mathematics should be mutually understandable, and in 1960 Hans Feudenthal created such a language he called Lincos (for “lingua cosmica”). Another suggestion is a language based on the period table of elements that are (we think) the same throughout the universe; this idea has been pursued by Carl L. Devito. If the signal is electromagnetic, the wavelength of the transmitted signal serves as a common unit of measurement between sender and receiver; you might describe yourself as being N wavelengths tall. Of course it is hard for us to think in any way except the way we do—it might be that another intelligent species with the capability of manipulating its environment to create a transmitter that we can detect could still perceive their environment in such a different way that it might be impossible to find a common ground for describing the same thing. But all of this is a problem that I’d like to have, and I don’t doubt that there would be many other individuals around the globe just as eager to help unravel any information from a detected signal. An old Southern cookbook starts a recipe by saying, “To cook a possum, you must first catch a possum.”

That’s my personal approach to SETI—it’s the detection of a signal that we must work on first. Even if there were no information encoded within a detected signal, or even if we can never decode it, the detection of a signal answers the old important question “Are we alone?” Even a cosmic dial tone tells us something else implicitly: It tells us that there’s a high probability that we can have a long technological future, because technologies must, on average, be long lived. Otherwise we would never overlap in time with another technological civilization, and the detection would not have occurred.

Philip Morrison used to put this most poetically—he called SETI “the archaeology of the future.” Because of the finite speed of light, a detected electromagnetic signal will give us information about their past, but it will tell us about our future.

Alas, the year 2001 has come and gone without moon bases, or privately operated orbital shuttles, but we’re getting there — the International Space Station may not have a Hilton, or rotate to provide artificial gravity, but at least it did just get its last major array of solar panels in place. And although PanAm Airways doesn’t exist any more, let alone the Orion III Space Clipper, private spaceflight did take a step forward recently with successful test flights of WhiteKnight Two, the launch vehicle for Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo private suborbital spacecraft.

2001: A Space Odyssey’s influence on later science fiction is impossible to underestimate, and the balletic spacecraft scenes set to sweeping classical music, the tarantula-soft tones of HAL 9000, and the ultimate alien artifact, the Monolith, have all become enduring cultural icons in their own right. Still, for those barbarians who find the measured pace of the masterpiece a little slow, check out this awesome one minute version of the movie. In Lego.

In many previous “Made For 3D” efforts, this has resulted in a lot of gratuitous and self-conscious “Look Ma – Depth!” activity, with characters carefully moving to face the screen so they can throw an object or thrust a hand at the audience. Mercifully, there’s only one or two such incidents in MvA. For most of the movie, the 3D is in the service of the storytelling, not the other way around. In particular, the 3D is often used as way to easily establish scale—handy in a movie where giant alien robots square off against puny (and not so puny) Earthlings. The movie also has a lushness about its virtual sets, something which I think Dreamwork’s rival, Pixar, has had an edge on, at least until now.

The movie itself merrily rolls along, drawing energetic inspiration from the classic science fiction B-movies of the 1950’s. The lead character in MvA is Susan Murphy (voiced by Reese Witherspoon), a bride-to-be who is struck by a meteor on her wedding day and transformed in the 49 foot, 11 inch-tall Ginormica. She is rounded up and kept in a secret government facility along with fellow monsters, B.O.B. (a gelatious blob voiced by Seth Rogan), Dr. Cockroach (a mad scientist who hybridized himself with a cockroach, played by Hugh Laurie), The Missing Link (a Creature From the Black Lagoon type, voiced by Will Arnett), and Insectosaurus (a giant bug that makes Susan look tiny, but doesn’t really do much in the talking department.) Things perk up for the monster crew when the military finds itself powerless to stop a rampaging alien robot. There’s an off-the-rack message thing of “be true to yourself” in here with Susan’s character arc, but it’s never allowed to bog down the adventure or the humor, which has enough slapstick to keep small children happy, while being laden with enough sly movie references to keep adults engaged.

Alien landscapes

Science fiction magazine

Seventies Japan

[via Pink Tentacle]

The movie centers on the dynamic between Klaatu (Reeves) and an astrobiologist (Connelly) who helps him escape the clutches of the U.S. government. Reeves is perfectly cast as the dispassionate and alien Klaatu, and Connelly makes a believable scientist. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the science and the science speak, and that the director didn’t feel it necessary to have the scientists constantly explaining every little bit of jargon to some audience surrogate, which tends to ruin the suspension of disbelief. Even if an audience doesn’t understand every word, they will pick up the ring of authenticity from such exchanges, which inevitably carries more dramatic weight than a group of scientists pausing in mid-conversation to explain to each other what a hyperbola is. Any essential upshot that the audience needs to know can then usually be conversationally conveyed in plain English, which is a language scientists have also been known to use.

But the character that steals the show is Gort, the robot enforcer that accompanies Klaatu. Gort has been updated well, and even when standing stock still conveys an impression of barely restrained violence that not even the original exuded. His menace is palpable through the screen: this is a Gort with personality. (John Cleese also has a great cameo as a nobel prize winner.)

Some critics of this movie have been unfavorably comparing it with the original, which they have retroactively elevated to the ranks of a great philosophical think piece. I’m a fan of the original too, but it’s not without glaring plot holes; its all-knowing Klaatu makes many absurd mistakes simply for the sake of appearing alien or advancing the story. The new version is much more internally consistent (and in fact may have spent a little too long establishing some things, for example, where the aliens got the DNA to build Klaatu’s human body.) I really enjoyed this movie, and appreciated that it didn’t try to paint a simplistic view of human nature. Human nature is complicated, and can’t be reduced to a single essence of “good” versus “bad.” For example, government officials are suspicious to the point of paranoia when Klaatu arrives, but as the movie shows, is it really paranoia if the aliens are actually drawing up plans to squish you out of existence? I also liked that, unlike the original, the new Klaatu isn’t held up as being beyond reproach, and that Cleese’s Nobel Laureate was allowed to draw him into a substantive debate, rather than the humbled acquiescence that marked that character’s response to Klaatu in the original.

This is an intelligent and well-made reimagining of a classic that has managed to keep some of the best stuff of the original (Don’t make Gort mad!), while losing elements that not even the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia can excuse. (I’m an incredibly powerful alien who understands human society well enough to go undercover in a nice boarding house, but I’ll give a bunch of huge flawless diamonds to this kid so we can go to the movies!)

SNF: What attracted you to this particular project?

SD: 20th Century Fox sent a script to me to me. I was very skeptical when I first got it because I love the original film and wasn’t sure it was a good idea to do a remake of it. But when I read the script, I thought it still needed work, but I felt like the idea of updating the movie had value. The original was rooted in the social issues of its time. I liked the idea of retelling the same story but changing the social issues to the issues that we are dealing with now. I also felt that it’s an amazing story that the majority of the movie-going public doesn’t know. That, combined with the visual possibilities of it, was it.

SNF: With a remake, were you worried that you’d be caught between the people who’d complain that you hadn’t departed from the original enough, and so were just making a copy, and those people who would see every change as an attack on a beloved classic?

SD: You can’t win with that. If you’re going to venture into remake territory with a film that has a fan base, you accept the fact that there’s a percentage you can’t please. I knew that going in and dealt with it ahead of time. But I believed in the value of doing the remake. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the original, just like I don’t think Peter Jackson thought there was anything wrong with King Kong. I do think that if you going to remake a beloved film, you have to respect the original and try to take from it everything that can be used and adapted to a modern audience. And I certainly did that with this film. There’s a lot of elements from the original film that are in this one.

SNF: What was the design brief you gave for Gort?

SD: I have to be honest, I really gave a terrible one to start with. When I first got on the movie, I thought we can’t bring Gort from the original film, with that tin-can figure. As incredibly cool as he is in the original, I just said we can’t do that. I also made the argument that it doesn’t really make sense that he could be in a human shape. So I said we’ve got to come up with something, something more linked to this alien technology we’re developing. Let’s wow the audience with something brand new. We worked for a good 3 or 4 months doing artwork and designs and concept work for a new Gort that would be completely re-imagined. It just got worse and worse and worse.

The more things that would come in, the more bizarre they would get, until I felt like I was looking at images from the Museum of Modern Art. I was with my visual effects supervisor, expressing that “we’ve got to get something better for this,” and he said, “I don’t understand why we’re not going back to the original on this.” I just kind of looked at him, and it was just one of those moments when I just realized “what am I thinking? How can I do this without letting Gort be Gort?” It was one of the biggest near-disasters that we had on the movie. I said get rid of everything that we’ve done, just give me an updated version of the original that modern audiences will like. That led to something that we all believed would be very satisfying to people who didn’t know the original movie, but at the same time is recognizable as Gort.

SNF: Where do you draw the line between scientific accuracy and trying to tell a good story?

SD: In moviemaking, if you have to choose between good storytelling and any kind of accuracy, you’re probably going to want to bend toward storytelling. But I actually don’t think that that choice is ever really forced on a filmmaker. I think you can almost always do both. I went through a lot of effort to make sure that the science of the movie was real, all the way down to the equations on the blackboard. All of these things that most people are not going to appreciate–that was put in there for people like your readers.

My feeling about it is that it’s science fiction, and because it’s science fiction, you got to be really respectful to the science element of it. I’m married to a nurse, and she is really, really ardent that in screenplays or movies that I’ve worked on, that all the medical aspects be properly presented. I think that filmmakers ought to be respectful of all fields and not just be lazy and put nonsense in movies because most people won’t know the difference. It’s disrespectful to the people in those professions, it doesn’t respect the significance or the import of what they do.

In this movie, our main character is a serious scientist in a real field. We felt it was critical to have some root of legitimacy –- if not complete legitimacy – in all of the dialogue and all of the science that’s presented. There are people who are going to see this movie who will know. If I put in there what was in the screenplay to start with, those people would’ve been pulled out of the movie. I think Hollywood’s often very guilty of not giving enough attention to these sort of things. In a science fiction film, you’re uniquely responsible to pay respect to the science represented in the movie.

SNF: How did you work with your science advisors?

SD: The first thing that I did was I gave the script we were working off of to [Seth Shostak] our science advisor and I asked him to tag everything that’s a misrepresentation of accurate science, and everything that might be, including dialogue and storytelling. It was a lot more than I was expecting. Once he had done that, I sat down with him, and just went through everything and the possibilities for changes. Some parts of it became more complicated, for example the equations on the blackboard [that feature in meeting between Klaatu and a Nobel Prize winner played by John Cleese]. It’s a real equation about [cosmology]. If an alien were to come to Earth that equation is one of the questions we’d want to ask.

SNF: Does this movie represent human nature as something that is going to evolve progressively or self-destruct?

That is the question that Klaatu is trying to ask. I think the film does ultimately take a position on that issue, and it’s not the position that everyone would take and its not just optimism. I think that the argument that John Cleese’s character makes is that it is human nature for us to destroy each other. But it is also human nature to have to get into those really difficult messes before there is enough motivation and enough admission of the truth to make the significant changes that are necessary for us to evolve. I really like that idea because I think it matters. I think its an idea that’s significant in the world right now and I think that’s it’s in the air, the idea that we can change, that America is changing and the world is changing. We’ve made a mess of this war in Iraq, we’ve made a mess of our economy, we’re making a mess of this environment that sustains us, but those very messes can become the things that motivate us to become better than we were in the first place. That’s an important idea.

An enjoyable romp, I Come For Love juxtaposis the “dissection’s too good for ‘em” sensibility of the classic 1950’s B-movies with the “save the innocent alien” ethos that came along in later decades. Nine-Oh and a hard-bitten reporter called (what else?) Scoop end up falling in love and must overcome diverse obstacles, viz, the U.S. Army and a mob of local townsfolk.

Which leads me to two questions: a) why are shows like I Come For Love so rare, i.e., why is there so little science fiction on the stage? and b) could humans and aliens ever interbreed?

The first question arises because if you look at theater’s cousins, TV and film, science fiction is everywhere. It always amuses me when, every few years, somebody writes about how fantasy or science fiction is finally entering the mainstream. After all, 15 of the 20 biggest all-time international box-office movies have been either science fiction or fantasy. Why do people think all those 1950’s B-movies got made? Because studio executives knew science fiction was immensely popular. Yet there’s very little science-fiction on the stage. Perhaps it’s because people expect a lasers-and-spaceships spectacle, but there’s more to science fiction than space opera: tightly drawn character studies that don’t require an army of CGI artists and a rendering farm are not exactly unknown in science fiction. Ironically, when CGI artists are used in the service of science fiction, it often involves actors working against green screens, painting in their minds the scene their character is supposed to be reacting to: at the recent screening of Sanctuary in New York, Amanda Tapping said that acting in these conditions was very similar to acting in a stage play with a sparse set.

As for my second question about human-alien interbreeding: not likely, but not absolutely beyond the bounds of the possible. Earth is home to millions of species, all directly related to each other through the tree of life. We all share the same cellular mechanisms, and the same genetic code that translates the base pairs in our DNA into proteins: a DNA sequence that creates protein X in animal A, will still create protein X if transplanted into animal B. But despite this similarity, pretty much what defines one group of organisms as a species is that members of the group can’t interbreed with organisms outside that group. If dogs can’t interbreed with their genetic cousins, cats, what hope for an alien and a human?

Well, the door isn’t completely closed. Scientist do routinely take genes from one animal and stick it another, creating a hybrid, transgenic, creation. This is how we end up with things like glow-in-the-dark mice: a jelly-fish gene that codes for a protein that fluoresces is introduced into a mouse’s cells, a genetic combination that could never happen naturally. But that’s working with a single gene—the mouse is still very much a mouse, not remotely like the picture of a bizarre creature with cheese-seeking tendrils that comes to mind when you wonder what you’d get if you crossed a mouse with a jellyfish. But is it possible to create a more hybridized creature, something that does share large scale traits from its parents, along the lines of mule inheriting aspects of horse and donkey biology? The answer is a big maybe for species that are closely related (one proposal for resurrecting the wooly mammoth would rely on hybridizing living elephant and preserved mammoth DNA). But the answer gets closer and closer to “no” the farther apart two species are on the tree of life.

The only way a human and alien would have even the faintest ghost of a chance of interbreeding biologically would be if the panspermia theory is correct and many planets across the galaxy were seeded with DNA in the distant past (this is how aliens can interbreed on Star Trek, for example.) As for I Come For Love—well, I might be betraying a bias here, but I’m all for any show where the journalist gets the girl.

A helluva lot of fun actually, dispelling my fears about its premise. You see, Wright has tried to make a game based around evolving a creature from a tidepool through sentience and beyond before: in 1990, as a sequel to the seminal SimCity, he released SimEarth. SimEarth allowed players to control things like plate tectonics, or bombard a planet with comets to create oceans, in the hopes of creating an ecosystem conducive to intelligent life. While intellectually interesting, the actual gameplay was a little dull.

But Spore has fun baked into its DNA: the game takes up a whopping 4 gigabytes of disk space, and all those bytes show up in the deep richness of the game’s environments (and then some. For example, in a later stage of Spore, there’s an in-game tool you can use to compose your own national anthem.) A huge amount of effort has gone in making the gameplay intuitive, rather than have the player drown in a sea of complex controls with no clear idea of what to do (which was big part of the problem with SimEarth.) Rather than an omniscient God looking down on your worlds, Spore puts you right into the action, and gives you the feel of truly exploring something vast.

Spore has five distinct stages, and the biological evolution angle actually only shows up in the first two. The first stage is brief, as you try to avoid being eaten in a tidepool and accumulate enough points to be allowed to crawl onto land. The second stage is where things really get interesting: as a land creature, now the goal is to accumulate enough points to develop sentience. As you roam the landscape, you have frequently have the chance to alter and incorporate new parts into your body plan. Your personal preferences and style of play will soon mold a unique creature–want to feast on that herd of heavily-armored herbivores two hills over? Invest in some serious teeth and claws. Tired of getting eaten by a nasty predator? Maybe faster feet are what you want.

The kind of choices you make in each stage of the game manifest in different starting abilities at the next stage. After the initial two stages, cultural evolution takes over, and you find yourself designing villages and airplanes rather than better tails and arms. In truth, the two middle stages, where you bring your tribe to continental prominence, and then seek global economic, military or religious domination, are the weakest, simply for being the least original. The gameplay adopts a style familiar to anyone who has played a real-time strategy title. But they’re still fun.

The final stage is when you achieve interstellar flight: you can explore the universe, searching for rare artifacts, or trade and establish diplomatic relations with your neighbors, or go to war, or all of the above. Comets, asteroid belts, nebulae, black holes, gas giants and more fill a galaxy full of stars. You can visit every star, every planet orbiting every star, and every valley and hill on every planet–I’ve visited 250 star systems so far, and I haven’t even really made a dent in the total population.

My only quibble with the game is that there is no autosave and only one “save” slot per game, meaning that if you make a mistake that leads to disaster, you sometimes find yourself spending a lot of time just digging yourself out, but, on the other hand, this does play into the whole evolutionary concept of effects–good and bad, small and large–inexorably shaping the future.

So, Spore came out a few years later than anyone expected. Usually that means Bad Things (veteran gamers will remember the Daikatana debacle), but in this case the obvious attention to getting the details right means that Spore was worth the wait.

Most planets featured in science fiction tend to be rather generic. These planets are usually convenient celestial bodies upon which to pitch a narrative tent for a few scenes before the plot moves on. Generic planets also tend to be one-note, reflecting some particular environment on Earth. You have your ice-worlds, desert worlds, lava worlds, jungle worlds, water worlds, city worlds, forest worlds (in particular, forests that look like those near the city of Vancouver), earthquake worlds, and so on.

But sometimes an author will create a world whose presence has a weight and ring of truth, a world that feels like it could happily go on existing on its own terms, with or without a protagonist or antagonist strolling around on its surface. Setting aside obviously artificial habitats like ring words or hollowed out asteroids, here are my top ten best science fiction planets, in chronological order:

1. Solaris (1961): You may or may not have liked the films, but Stanislaw Lem’s conception of a world so utterly alien that it defies any genuine human comprehension still resonates.
2. Dune (1965): Best Planet Ever. At first glance, it’s just one of those one-note desert worlds. But Frank Herbert created a complete ecosytem, deep geological history, and a complex native society to go with his sand-covered planet. Dune is no mere backdrop, it drives the plot of Herbert’s complex saga as inexorably as the law of gravity.
3. Annares (1974): Ursula LeGuin’s novel The Dispossessed featured two worlds, a more-or-less straightforward analog for cold-war era Earth, and the far more interesting Annares, where settlers established an anarcho-syndicate-based society in a bid to be free from authoritarian government. LeGuin created a believable society for Annares—including the unpleasant side effects (such as intellectual conservatism) of trying to create a human utopia.
4. Mote Prime (1974): In Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s The Mote in God’s Eye, this is the homeworld of the Moties, a species that, due to cosmic happenstance, has been bottled up in its solar system ever since it evolved. Mote Prime is planet which has become a palimpsest, mutely testifying to the endless cycles of technological development and collapse experienced by the trapped Moties.
5. LV-426 (1979): The dread planet that featured briefly in Alien, and was the location for 1986’s Aliens. In both movies, LV-426 is perfectly portrayed as part of a cosmos utterly indifferent to human concerns, such as staying alive.
6. Dagobah (1980): The Star Wars franchise is a planet-producing machine: Tatooine, Yavin IV, Alderan, Hoth, Endor, Coruscant, Naboo, etc, etc. But Dagobah sticks out for its organic messiness and claustrophobic atmosphere that stands in contrast to the typical open spaces that provide the large stages for the movies’ space opera.
7. Lusitania (1986): The setting of Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for the Dead, Lusitania is the exception that proves the rule—it is fascinating not because it is a rich world, but because its ecosystem has so little diversity, and the implications that has for the book’s characters.
8. Red, Green and Blue Mars (1993-1996): Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy has become the standard against which all hard science fiction books about Mars are weighed. Beginning in the near future, with the founding of the first permanent outpost on the red planet, and continuing for two centuries as Mars is terraformed, Robinson’s Mars is a meticulously researched and believable fictional version of our solar system neighbor.
9. P2 (2004): P2 is a world orbiting the nearby Barnard’s star, and it is settled by fantastically advanced exiles from the solar system in Wil McCarthy’s Lost in Transmission. Unfortunately, all their technology can’t make up for some basic deficiencies in the carrying capacity of the Barnard system, and what happens to P2 is reminiscent of Flowers for Algernon, but on a planetary scale.
10. Nasqueron (2004): A gas giant, home of the maddeningly unconcerned Dwellers, and location of much of Iain M. Banks’ The Algebraist. Nasqueron becomes not just the huge canvas the Banks requires for his sprawling tales, but also becomes an integral element in the plot, as the protagonist struggles to understand the Dwellers.

Image: promotional poster for Dune