Not if, but when? “Life” and “Arrival” stoke age-old alien debates
There’s a scene from Ridley Scott’s 1979 film “Alien” that’s become a prototypical depiction of extraterrestrial life in pop culture.
You know the one: Man enjoys an interplanetary pasta dinner among friends on a spaceship. Indigestion hits — serious indigestion. Friends huddle around just in time for some thing to make a decidedly unceremonious exit out of the man’s chest. A space baby — and beloved franchise — is born.
If film is any indication, we’ve long had aliens on the brain (or in the chest). But lately, major Hollywood films’ depictions of life beyond Earth have become more realistic as our ideas of aliens have gone from “what if ” to “what could be.”
Take “Arrival,” a Best Picture nominated sci-fi film that asks how we would communicate with aliens should they make contact — and how that scenario would be as much of a test to our ability to communicate with one another. Or the latest, “Life,” which casts a fast-growing single-cell organism in a petri dish as the antagonist E.T. for a crew (featuring Ryan Reynolds and Jake Gyllenhaal) on the International Space Station. Here, the unsexy minutiae of biological procedural — namely, the importance of quarantine — gets the space horror treatment.
It makes sense that the big
screen’s takes on alien contact are no longer so pie-in-the-sky. Discoveries of nearby planets that could theoretically support life have become a common occurrence in recent years, including last month’s discovery of seven Earth-like planets just 39 light years away, the universe’s equivalent of a next-door neighbor.
As alien films become down to Earth, is contact with intelligent life a matter of time — a slam dunk, or space jam, if you will?
We took that question to Dr. Douglas Duncan, professor of Astrophysical & Planetary Sciences at the University of Colorado in Boulder and director of the Fiske Planetarium. Duncan explained that, while it’s likely that alien life has formed somewhere in our unfathomably massive universe, time may not be on our side. The universe is more than 13 billion years old, but mankind has only been conscious, or intelligent, for a fraction of that.
“I think it’s likely that life has arisen out there somewhere in space, but also sometime over the last 13 billion years,” he said. “If we go on another few decades and there’s absolutely no contact, then I think it’s telling us a message, and I think the message is not a very cheerful one: Intelligent life typically does not last for a very, very long time,” he said.
Questions about intelligent life forms, including humans, and their ability to sustain existence over millennia haven’t even fully been answered yet, Duncan said.
“If intelligent life only lasts a few thousand years, we’re alone,” he said.
In other words, we might die before we actually lay our eyes on aliens.
That’s a bummer — particularly if your favorite part of alien flicks is finding out how the filmmakers decide to depict the space creature du jour. From exposed brains inside fish bowls to blueskinned rain forest warriors who mate by entangling tails, Hollywood has had its fun spinning off the “little green man” trope.
As far as science is concerned, there is no single presiding idea for what form aliens could take. Just look at humans and octopuses, Duncan said — both earthlings, but with decidedly different aesthetic flair. (One thing science can tell us is that aliens will be made of stardust. No, really: Every known element on Earth can trace its origins back to a star explosion, a rule that should apply to alien life, too.)
But there are some out there who have claimed to have seen them with their own eyes. For this decidedly fringe faction, alien contact is more than a maybe; it’s a memory.
Boulder-based filmmaker Patty Greer, who has released eight documentaries chronicling her experiences with crop circles, said she’d actually been “taken” twice in her life — not physically, but telepathically.
Recalling what a friend had told her about the encounter (Greer was unconscious for it), the beings revealed themselves as “two orbs of light.”
Take that as you will. But say an E.T. does phone us at home. Should we even answer the call? That was the question “Arrival” posed, and one to which “Life” proffers an ominous answer.
Duncan’s CU Boulder students often ask him about the possibility of what to do should we obtain the means to contact with aliens.
“Many of them think we should listen and not talk,” he said. “I think I kind of agree with them.”
If that’s the tack to take — and considering it’s in line with the opinion of space nerd Stephen Hawking, it might be -- that’s one thing many of Hollywood’s ominous alien films would seem to get right. Duncan, who’s an armchair sci-fi historian, gives “Arrival” even more credit, saying its depiction of humans scrambling to decode an alien language is one of the more realistic interpretations of first contact he has seen. (Greer and her peers weren’t so fond of “Arrival,” questioning the accuracy of its vertically docking spaceships. “It just doesn’t happen,” she said.)
While neither “Arrival” nor “Life” hold the answers, Duncan gives the genre a lot of credit, if for no reason other than getting theaters full of people to think outside their boxes.
“Thinking about other life is always instructive for us,” Duncan said. “I think that’s why science fiction movies are so longlived, because they’re talking about the aliens, but they’re also talking a lot about us.”