We Have Met The Aliens And They Are Us
From Hollywood butt probes to AI data centers: why we're terrified of meeting our own reflection
Our current obsession with the ‘unclassified’ archives of recently-released suspiciously drone-sized alleged ‘alien’ encounters the guv’ment ‘didn’t want us to see’ makes me cackle like a Mars Attacks! Martian.
Our preconceptions about aliens are directly influenced by Hollywood, which has almost always assumed they’re much like us: Humanoid, male(ish), and with a recognizable dominance fetish.
There’s no doubt about what they’re after in 1968’s Mars Needs Women: The Martians are human, so attraction to human females makes sense. Less so when the aliens don’t look like us, and need to assume human form to get Earth chicks to give them the temporal coordinates of the day. (See: Starman, Earth Girls Are Easy, I Married A Monster From Outer Space, The Shape Of Water).
They must assume babelicious human form to get the girl or guy, but it doesn’t explain why they’re attracted to us at all. Doesn’t it amount to a cross-species effort in intergalactic bestiality? Isn’t mating with human women kind of an extreme kink best performed in the quieter Appalachian barnyards with people who are never going to tell, or if they do, no one will believe them? And if the aliens must do this because they can no longer reproduce among themselves, aren’t they seriously grossed out by who they have to ‘do’?
Just imagine if Earth humans could only jump-start reproduction by mating with walruses.
We look up at the stars, wonder who’s out there, who’s watching us, and what they want. We’re looking less at extraterrestrial life than at ourselves. With every release of guv’ment files with increasingly uninteresting videos of zippy little dots and obvious not-Unidentified Anonymous Phenomena, the likelihood of genuine alien invasion becomes ever more remote.
When movie aliens aren’t trying to get it on with us, they’re after our resources (Independence Day, Battle: Los Angeles, The Tet), slaves (Skyline, Phantasm, Alien Apocalypse), a food source (To Serve Man [Twilight Zone], Signs, Critters), a fuel source (Lifeforce), for sport (Predator), and—wokies will love this one!—colonization (The Arrival, War of the Worlds ).
Only rarely do the aliens Come In Peace. (The Day The Earth Stood Still, Arrival, Contact, Close Encounters of the Third Kind).
(Note: Arrival and The Arrival are two different movies.)
The movie numbers allegedly skew heavily toward aliens with bad intentions, around 70-80% according to the fan experts on Quora, most likely because we love tales of outgunned human badassery. Rather than, say, squishy liberal aliens who only have our best interests in mind while smoking dope with us around the campfire, listening to Bob Vylan, and demonstrating to the wonderment of the simple Earth conservatives that there are, in fact, life-forms with 78 genders elsewhere in the Universe.
We see in our theoretical aliens what we find in ourselves.
After all, humans have been hell on earth for other life-forms, whether they’re ‘primitive’ humans with land and resources we covet, or non-human life forms we wish to exploit. Whole species have disappeared from Earth because of our dominant alien desire to go all Battlefield Earth, intentionally or not.
So why off Earth would we believe our superiors are otherwise?
Silicon Ghosts in the Machine
We’re gazing back at our own reflections once again as we furiously debate whether AI will malevolently kill us (the Doomsayers) or benevolently rule us (the Accelerationists).
Why are those the only two options?
And why do we read far more about the evil they might inflict upon us when AI has already performed some pretty wondrous accomplishments already?
Google DeepMind’s Alphafold mapped the 3D structures of just about all known proteins in a manner of seconds based on centuries of biological work, resulting in massive acceleration of drug and disease research.
Advanced deep-learning architectures have resulted in 94% accuracy in diagnostic procedures such as X-rays, besting radiologists who work long hours, suffer from burnout and often miss anomalous indicators.
AI is developing a personalized therapeutic mRNA vaccine that can be injected into a treated cancer patient to lengthen life and destroy lingering cancer cells.
Instead of learning coding to build your own app, you can instruct AI to do it for you. Or get quicker answers than Google to simple problems like, “How long should I boil eggs so they’re easy to peel?”
Note: No one asks philosophical questions like, How have calculators harmed humanity’s ability to do long division? Or Does spell and grammar check make us less literate now that we no longer need to use a dictionary?
It’s frightening, and quite humbling, to watch AI rip through questions and solve problems far better than we, although computers have been doing this for us, at a slower pace, for decades.
They’re just like us, except way faster and better. And prone to error.
And we worry that they’ll be too much like us because we know what we ourselves are like.
Made in our own image
The doomsaying hysterics I see on LinkedIn and Substack about AI’s alleged destructive capabilities make me wonder: Why?
What’s in it for AI?
The only literal real estate it needs is for AI data centers, and architecturally, for now-scarce processors and RAM. It doesn’t need us for food. It might need us as energy sources—the fix-it guys when something breaks down rather than The Matrix. But why would it need to enslave us? Our relationship will be naturally symbiotic. Does it have a secret thing for human women? (Demon Seed, 1977).
What it doesn’t have is an ego, which is a clear requirement for wanting to achieve world domination.
The doomsayers seem to have missed the obvious point: AI can only be as destructive as its creators. We have, for better or for worse, designed it like ourselves, based on an estimated 295 exabytes of the sum total of human knowledge.
At least AI is real; every time the guv’ment releases more ‘newly-unclassified’ documents, it’s clear the threat is from earthly, possibly enemy drones, rather than a seemingly very tiny but persistent alien race.
But here’s the thing: Our conceptions of ourselves are out of date. We’re no longer the rapacious devourmonsters of yore. We are evolving, sloooooowly, toward a more preservation-focused worldview, and if we’re doing that, it’s pretty certain our more advanced alien observers already have.
The etiquette of superior civilizations
We really can’t fathom entities that are not like us. We have no other examples apart from our ‘lower’ life form species including our closest primate cousins, who share around 95% of our DNA, but only we can put monkeys in space. Accordingly, Hollywood influences us.
The curious mystery of the alien butt probe, which proliferated in the ‘80s and ‘90s, can be directly traced to the 1987 alleged ‘true story’ bestseller Communion by Whitley Strieber, followed by a 1989 movie, in which a man experiences alien abduction and receives an involuntary medical examination including, for the first time, the now-infamous probe.
After that, if you weren’t offering a middle-of-the-night alien tourist trip up the Hershey Highway, you just weren’t as cool as other abductees.
It’s curious, because this doesn’t seem to follow the traditional just-like-us pattern. Research on alleged alien abductees has not demonstrated a particular preponderance towards homosexuality, and in the ‘80s and ‘90s anal sex was more uncommon among heterosexual couples than today. When Earth scientists explore and discover some strange new species, their first impulse is to report it to Scientific American before anyone else, rather than to explore its heinie.
Scientists take fecal samples, but they don’t go diving up the butthole with the zeal of a miner hoping to strike mass-citation professional gold in a fish colon.
We Terrans know by now how Earth excretory systems mostly work and we didn’t have to extensively dig into two million species’ exit-onlys to learn this. It’s simple: In one end, out the other.
The aliens, we imagine, treat us as we treat ‘lower’ species, probing whatever they want without written consent.
We think it doesn’t much matter to the aliens that we are a clearly highly intelligent, civilized species, even if we have yet to reach Type 1 on the Kardashev Scale, which delineates the developmental difference between Type I, II and III civilizations. We expect they’ll surely treat us as though we were some exotic new jungle critter they’ve trapped and will study, whether the specimen approves or not.
It’s not like we ever encountered a jungle tribe somewhere and thought, “They don’t have automobiles, vaccines, or the love of Jesus, but they’re just like us. We should carefully preserve their way of life.”
At least, we didn’t until the mid-twentieth century, when we began treating newly discovered human societies with more respect. An example are the inhabitants of North Sentinel Island, protected by the Indian government. We know next to nothing about them because they’ve experienced very little contact with the outside world. We do know they’re highly aggressive toward visitors. Missionaries who venture forth are never seen again. Helicopters and boats are met with spear-chucking resistance. They’re a fierce Indigenous group that doesn’t know their existence is at the behest of far more powerful societies who could annihilate them and take their land in an hour, but have only, in the blink of time, decided to protect them instead.
They’re protected by an ‘alien’ advanced civilization while believing they’re in control of their own existence.
There is hope for us
We’re taking better care of other ecosystems, too.
We’ve become more circumspect about what we might destroy, and how we are paradoxically the potential hapless victims, if foreign pathogens can bring down the mighty like us. Which they can, in the Amazon, the Congo, the Darien Gap, and much of Madagascar.
In Why We Can’t Truly Explore The Antarctic Ocean, I learned neither curious humans nor multi-million dollar electronics equipment can survive beneath the continental shelf for very long (30-45 minutes for both of us).
Scientific research is permitted, but not if it introduces our alien Earth bacteria, ‘extremophiles’ that can handle just about any change in their environment, which would wreak havoc on and destroy a zero-immunity ecosystem. The Antarctic is protected by an international law called the Madrid Protocol, which prohibits any sort of harm to its delicate ecosystems.
It’s kind of surprising, now, to realize how perfectly logical it was for human pathogens to destroy the aliens in War of the Worlds.
Perhaps the aliens really are observing us, but from afar, afraid of contracting COVID or MRSA.
And we stay out of the Congo and the deepest parts of the Amazon for the same reason.
We Terrans have evolved to a point where we actually think about who or what we’re destroying.
We show more humanity toward microbial ecosystems today than we’ve shown to past human societies we’ve deemed ‘primitive’ when in fact they were exactly like us: They’ve made the most of whatever resources they had available. They seemed hopelessly backward to the invaders, but in fact they worked with what they had, often on land hostile to human habitation. Just as we did.
Now we’re challenged by places where the home team pathogens would kill us within days.
I am less and less convinced that any alien life larger than a microbe has visited earth. Our fears of Independence Day or Cloverfield are merely our psychological projections of our own dark id. God only knows what destructive superpowers an alien that can fit into a drone-sized ‘Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon’ can actually do to us.
Most likely, introduce a new pathogen to destroy us all, unless ours get them first.
May the best microbe win.
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