I confess, I have a problem. I am unable to pull myself away from all of the Alien movies and the new show, Alien Earth. It's been puzzling me because it's been so captivating, and I think I'm seeing an interesting connection between our real world problems and my fascination with the discomfort and disgust of these horrible stories.
We Used to Be Food
One of the moments at the very beginning of the Alien Earth series that gave me serious pause for reflection was this little observation from the synthetic chief scientist, Kirsh:
You used to be food, you know.
Humanity.
Your lives were short and filled with fear. Then your brains grew. You built tools and used them to conquer nature. You built impossible machines and went to space. You stopped being food.
Or, I should say, you told yourself you weren't food anymore.
But in the animal kingdom, there is always someone bigger or smaller who would eat you alive if they had the chance. That's what it is to be an animal. You're born. You live. You die.
It's chilling to think that even in this big world that we've created around us, it still doesn't shield us from nature. Rarely, that means those bigger or fiercer creatures that you could run into by chance, but maybe more often it's the nature of the micro-scale: the disease, the virus, or even systemic issues from the environment to our own bodies.
Don't get me wrong, at least in the wealthiest countries, we have done so much to improve the quality of our lives, to be able to have a relatively low infant mortality rate, to have vaccines that promote the health of communities, to be able to slow the progression of incurable diseases. And it's not enough.
To help explain, I lean on a grotesque scene in the second episode of Alien Earth (I'll spare the gory details and keep it light). A ship has crashed into a huge building on Earth, carrying several species of aliens, including the infamous xenomorph (the beautifully designed creature from the Alien franchise), which obviously escapes from the crashed spaceship to terrorize and kill everything it can find in the building.
A rescue team is sent in to try and find any injured people from the crash and assess the scene. One medic, Joe Hermit, gets separated while being chased by the xenomorph. He manages to evade the monster and gets to the 65th floor of the building and reunites with another search party soldier. They find a room full of people dressed in Victorian garb—curly white-haired wigs, puffy sleeves, corsets and all. These are wealthy elites, sitting mindlessly at the top of their tower, complaining about all of the noise caused by the spaceship crashing into the building.
"Well I'm sure if it's a real problem, Boy Kavalier will call me personally. We belong to the same club," the man the script calls "His Lordship" says as he ignores the soldier and medic's attempts at getting them to evacuate. The xenomorph conveniently reveals itself shortly after the absurd scene and lays waste to all of the foolish rich people in their fancy outfits. You can almost hear the message: Your money means nothing.
We used to be food. We decided we weren't going to be anymore. But are we really any different than how we started?
Feel free to skip this next paragraph if you don't want the image in your head, I include it for those who have seen the show:
To drive this point home even further, the episode puts up two horrible, parallel shots. The first is with the rescue crew that gets into the wrecked spaceship. They find a cat aboard that has been so badly injured that it drags itself along the floor with its two front paws. Later at the 65th floor dinner party, His Lordship is seen crawling in the same manner—legs no longer part of his body. Man and animal in precise harmony.
Refuge
Technology has been touted for so long as a saving force. We know there is a lot of Western Christian imagery and themes that are bound into our current set of technology. Tech is often talked about as if it were a serpent on a staff, raised to save those who would simply look upon it, or maybe it's the Savior figure himself: the incomprehensible solution to every problem.
The world is a scary place and nature acts as an inscrutable, impersonal, violent force. It giveth and it taketh away—then it destroyeth and decayeth. Sometimes nature feels like an encounter with the xenomorph.
The inexorable laws of nature alone will do nicely to crush my own egotistical sense of power in the world, and I don't need to read the universal uncontrollable forces as being transcendental or wholly other. This is why, I think, the biological monsters created by H.R. Giger in Ridley Scott's film Alien are so horrific: we are as helpless (at least in the first three acts) in the face of these natural selection machines as we are before any traditional deity...
I think this tension between the harshness of the natural world and the parallel, but at least human-made, technological world is what makes these movies and aliens so attention-grabbing to me.
There is a sense of control in our technology: I feel empowered every time I get something I've programmed working. I turn on a fan when I feel too warm in my office. I fill up my water bottle from inside my own home when I'm thirsty. These are incredible, unthinkably powerful things. I also have a disease (multiple sclerosis) that I carry with me, that may lash out at me at any unsuspecting moment. The weather can destroy my home or threaten my safety. Something as simple and tiny as a virus could kill me from within.
The safety and comfort of technology surrounds me, and yet I know I'm still a vulnerable little animal at my core. That puts me on edge. It's not the ever-present potential of threat that a squirrel might experience out in the wild, it's a subtle anxiety that hides in the shadows of my thoughts: What if?
Monsters of contemporary horror are not like their medieval counterparts, who were more like God's henchman. That older paradigm held out the inevitability of monstrous defeat by divine justice, but the contemporary monster is often a reminder of theological abandonment and the accompanying angst. Nor are the more recent horror monsters like the monsters of the Enlightenment, products of human superstition that can be conquered by the light of reason. Monsters after Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud are features of the irrevocable irrationality inside the human subject and outside in nature.
Cyborg
The point here is not exacerbate our anxieties, but to also try and avoid being the idiotic, clueless cos-players at the 65th floor dinner party. When we become too insulated and too used to our wealth or privilege, we become vulnerable to the surprises of nature. The fix is not to become overly anxious nor to become draconic hoarders. I think part of the fix is the opposite: gratitude and resource-sharing.
Gratitude is noticing that the water flows cleanly and reliably from the tap. Gratitude is noticing that the dark, scary, spider-filled part of the garage can be illuminated with a light switch or a flashlight. Gratitude says, I have enough, then considers, Maybe I have more than enough, and I can share.
Resource-sharing is not just about your individual contributions, though of course that is valuable and impressive. When I think about the current real-life threats to modern humans, disease and AI are the biggest threats that come to mind, but I'm starting to wonder if we need more focus on disease right now. Consider these two examples from Jonathan Kennedy's excellent research:
Tuberculosis was another major killer in the slums of industrializing Europe, but it declined in high-income countries as living and working conditions improved, antibiotics were developed and national immunization programs were introduced in the mid-twentieth century. And yet, despite the fact that there is a cheap and reasonably effective vaccine available...it is still the most deadly infectious disease in the world. It kills about 1.2 million people a year, almost all of whom live in lower- and middle-income countries.
Because COVID-19 is such an infectious pathogen, the hoarding of vaccines is not just callous selfishness on the part of high income countries: it is potentially a massive own goal that could very well prolong the pandemic and increase the likelihood of new, more dangerous variants emerging.
Wealth absolutely shields us from a lot of issues, day-to-day dangers, and diseases in general, but it is not infallible. I'm convinced that the greater the disparity between the rich and the poor—at whatever scale you want to look at, global or local—the greater the risk to all people, regardless of wealth.
Rather than learning from the COVID-19 pandemic we barely got through, we have watched politicians and other actors gut the very institutions that are at the forefront of public health. Programs like USAID were destroyed, which helped world-wide health initiatives—not only saving lives, but doing the work that's needed to keep pathogenic threats at bay. We are dressing ourselves up in ignorant, fancy clothes and insulating ourselves in a dinner party far from the inconveniences of "lesser" people.
When we as a society turn away and turn inward, are we setting ourselves up to becoming the food again? Not to the xenomorph. This time, it's not "someone bigger" that will take the advantage of our vulnerability.