Do you have arguments with others about whether aliens portrayed on the big or small screen are ‘realistic’? Most of them aren’t, but there’s a good reason. Earlier this month, I discussed a chapter in Ian Stewart’s book The Mathematics of Life about how life is defined on our planet. The next chapter (“Is Anybody Out There?”) discusses potential extraterrestrial life. I like Stewart’s argument for why many TV or movie aliens fit a narrow range:
“In those media, before computer graphics reached its current level of realism, aliens had to be thinly disguised human actors, insects magnified to gigantic proportions, or invisible presences that glowed in the dark, emitted sparks or disturbed the air and moved the curtains. Now they can be impressively detailed creatures that inspire terror, like… in Alien, or they can be cute and cuddly like the Ewoks… And that is what their designers intend, and it is why the aliens in the media mislead us about what real aliens might look like. Media aliens are invented in order to stimulate specific human emotions. This makes them hopeless parochial, and many of their features make no scientific sense at all.”
I’ll have to explain what Stewart means by ‘parochial’. He credits his biologist friend Jack Cohen for making the following distinction between universals and parochials. Parochials are specific features, accidents of nature contingent with other specifics shaped by the local environment. Universals relate to broader principles – you expect to see these general features because evolution is a general (universal) mechanism. Examples serve to illustrate this so I’ll quote Stewart once more.
“Five digits on a hand is parochial, but appendages that can manipulate objects are universal. Wings covered in feathers are parochial, but the ability to fly in an atmosphere is a universal. Daisies are parochial, but photosynthesis – obtaining energy from light – is universal... Universals are features that are very likely to evolve on other suitable worlds… but [this] does not mean that such creatures will exist everywhere, not even on every suitable planet. Flight needs an atmosphere, for instance, but we don’t expect every planet with an atmosphere to have flying creatures… Parochials, on the other hand, are local accidents, and we would not expect to see them elsewhere. The creatures of our planet, at any level of detail, are mostly parochial instances of universals.”
What Stewart is saying is that aliens portrayed in the media hew closely to the parochials of life as we know it. Perhaps that’s because too far a deviation from the parochial features we’re familiar with might lead us to not recognize an alien life form if we met one. Stewart then goes on to argue that when you think about aliens, you also need to consider that they “evolved in some environment elsewhere in the universe, and it would be adapted to that environment”. That takes more work. An oxygenic atmosphere as an energy source may not be widespread on alien worlds. Perhaps hydrogen-breathers outnumber oxygen-breathers. But then, maybe that prevents them for evolving into sufficiently complex multicellular organisms to exhibit intelligence.
Or maybe it should be called extelligence, according to Stewart and Cohen, which they define as “the ability to store cultural capital and know-how outside ourselves in a form that can be widely accessed”. Apes, dolphins, octopi, and other creatures are ‘smart’ in some sense. But they haven’t developed writing or libraries, generally speaking. Stewart argues that “brain structure is parochial” but that extelligence “ought to be a universal… offering clear evolutionary advantages” even though we have a sample size of one at the moment. Most TV or movie aliens that exhibit extelligence (not the ones that are just apex predators out to kill and eat humans) are portrayed remarkably like humans socially. The ones in the movie Arrival might be a rare case where their unlikeness is emphasized a little more. It must be difficult for the visitors to be on a planet so alien to themselves that they stay confined and for the most part inscrutable. Their otherness feels alien. Perhaps that’s as it should be. Every so often, we should be shaken out of our parochial anthropocentric point-of-view.
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