Why Sci-Fi movies about aliens make zero sense
Is first contact with exterrastial life going to be like this?
Probably not.
The only model we have for what non-Earth creatures might look like is by imagining the life replicated itself in similar conditions on a similar planet. That is why, when scientists look for signs of life outside of our planet, they look for Earth-like planets. I'm not going to guess at what kinds of life exists on far off planets, but I want to complain how I think the film industry misrepresents the likelihood of how we someday may interact with alien life.
Humans, at least in our civilized form, have only been around since 10,000 BC. So, around 12,000 years. Before that, there were millions of years of all sorts of different creatures, but none of them had the sophisticated communication skillset, that is presumably necessary to coordinate travel outside our planet. So humans are the model, since we have sent spaceships to the furthest reaches of our galaxy, and we have sent humans to the moon.
Consider that last bit. A satellite managed to get to Pluto, which is 2.757 billion miles away. The moon is 250,000 miles away.
2.757 billion / 250,000 = ~11,000
That means humans are currently capable of sending satellites 11,000 times further than we are able to send humans. And as technology continues to improve, but our biology remains roughly the same, I’d expect this gap to continue widening.
So, this gets to my gripe with the idea that that our first interaction with alien life would be with a life form. If we just look at the success humans have had exploring different planets, almost certainly, our first experience would be with some distant
satellite, or some sort of light/wave/vibration sensing technology that is able to traverse across solar systems.
There is pretty much 0 chance that our first contact with alien life would be interacting with another life form. It just logically doesn't make any sense. Certainly not using human space exploration as a model.
And true, no evidence of extraterrestrial life has been verifiably discovered. But at least, can we make a movie that tries to treat it seriously? Look at the major sci-fi films that come out. And I can forgive the fun ones like Star Trek/Star Wars/ Guardians of the Galaxy/Independence Day.
But like, Arrival? It’s a good movie but c’mon, Aliens are just gonna park themselves on our planet without testing Earth out first.
These movies all deal with intelligent alien life forms. But I have yet to see anything that deals with the challenges humans will face when recognizing that something is recording us, testing us, from trillions of miles away.
Contact kind of addresses this in a complicated way. Carl Sagan wrote the novel, so it makes sense it’s a bit more realistic. And back in 1997 that movie still made 171 million! Though I suspect a lot of that was due to religious marketing (the film has theological undertones), at least it shows it is economically viable to produce a film that treats the subject seriously.
And anyway, I'm just assuming we'd be discovered by an alien life prior to us discovering one. There are a lot of possible answers to Fermi's Paradox, and most of which are depressing. I won't go into that here. I really just want to watch movies and not have that sense of vague irritation, that even if the plotline and story is good, the premise is logically flawed. Movies about monsters have their place, and are easy to film, but I think we deserve better.
So can we have just one film that tries that tries to be as realistic as possible? I'd bet it would be successful.
Someone write up a script!