07/23/2020
Jason D. Batt, Creative Director, 100 Year Starship
Dr. Mae Jemison. Principal, 100 Year Starship
First Contact
From The Day the Earth Stood Still, Contact and Independence Day to A for Andromeda, Arrival, Blue Wave and Alien, popular culture has explored the “first contact” — the moment when we, humans, discover that life and intelligence exists and originated independently of our planet Earth. Pursuing the capabilities for interstellar exploration and their potential to transform life here on Earth, propels the potential moment of first contact to the forefront. At 100 Year Starship we recognize that just the possibility of scientific confirmation that we are not the “only game in the universe”—will fundamentally change our society. Just how, depends on who participates in the envisioning.
We ask and keep trying to answer the same questions with each fictional account of first contact. What will they be like? How will they communicate? What will they look like? Are they good or evil? Are they friendly or do they come to invade? What can we anticipate from “them”? Will they share their technology? If they have superior tech and knowledge, does that mean they are “superior” and we are “inferior”? How will we recognize them? And which person, culture, government will represent us humans? Us Earthlings?
This first contact future moment has spawned its own substantial mythology. Let us just consider movies. “…Crowds of people run into the streets looking up at the great ships overhead…” This scene has been repeated many times in films with a variety of results: destruction, advancement, confusion, and enslavement. In some stories, we are the monster unable to understand, stoking conflict based on our fears. In others, “they” are refugees at our door seeking our help. We encounter “them” in space and they try to help. “They” come to subjugate us and exploit our rich planet. Throughout human history this one possible event, meeting beings from the sky” has captured much of our collective psyche.
Carl Jung pondered: “[Humanity] is on this planet a unique phenomenon which [we] cannot compare with anything else. The possibility of comparison and hence of self-knowledge would arise only if [we] could establish relations with quasi-human mammals inhabiting other stars” (The Essential Jung 369).
Despite the immense fullness and beauty of nature, today there often seems to be an aching loneliness in our collective existence. We look up to discover ourselves. Considering all of the potential ways that moment of first contact may proceed, we are not so much trying to conceive of “them” as we are hoping for a “cosmic mirror” with which to better see ourselves. The conundrums that truly drive the fiction of first contact are the ones we feel inadequate to: Are we ready or should we be afraid and try to remain hidden? How will we respond? How should we respond? Will we aspire to our better selves and reach out in peace? Which current relationship postures currently trending on Earth will be reenacted when we encounter others amongst the stars?
2020 is proving to be a monumental year that challenges our science, sense of community and justice, our empathy and will, and most especially our collective wisdom. Imagine the impact of discovery of life in deep space on what it means to be an Earthling today and the years to come. Cosmic comparisons may or may not make us feel better about ourselves, but we will get to know ourselves better. Starting the “what if” discussion now may allow us to begin to remedy what we might be ashamed to discover at a later even more critical point in time.
In the final moments of The Day the Earth Stood Still the visitor from space Klaatu advises, “Your choice is simple: join us and live in peace, or pursue your present course and face obliteration. We shall be waiting for your answer.” Released January 1, 1951, in the waning shadow of World War II and the building Civil Rights Movement, the film posed a concern born of the time, and which still lingers awaiting our answer in 2020. Or perhaps, our behavior over the last 70 years is the answer we are too frightened to admit—we are unable to alter our course and Klaatu’s threat of obliteration grows ever closer.
Seeming to emerge from the depths of our unconscious, the intelligence in the movie Alien suggests that if what is out there is a cosmic reflection of what we are, we really should be afraid. The creature, Xenomorph XX121 that decimates the crew and pursues Ripley through the Nostromo is both chthonic and primal—raw rage and unrelenting appetite. The film’s title alone, Alien, infers that what we encounter in that first contact moment will be beyond our own understanding and our imagination: perhaps something whose attention we should have avoided. Revisiting Jung’s conjecture, the unrelenting grasp that first contact has on our imagination, may be that what we fear that is truly alien is ourselves.
Ted Chiang’s Arrival, first a brilliant short story and then a major motion picture, creates a paradoxical, unsettling experience—something sinister, unknown, swimming up to meet us—and a surprising gift of hope: the discovery that “they” see great potential in us. Part and parcel of first contact is that humans will encounter life forms more technically, culturally and socially advanced than we are. Will these “grown-ups” of the universe, find us worthy? Can they see something in us that we desperately hope is still there, something worth saving and fanning into flame?
The likelihood of life arising elsewhere in the universe, grows everyday as stars with orbiting planets are more and more seeming to be the rule and not the exception. Even if only a very small percentage of the billions of stars in our Milky Way Galaxy have planets in their “Goldilocks Zone” – just right for carbon based life—it is not unreasonable to postulate that life arose many times in our galaxy and sometimes evolved significant intelligence. And the universe has billions of galaxies and billions of years old. The mythology about first contact, in most tellings is not an end. It is the beginning. Humans exist beyond that first contact event. But in no tale are we ever the same afterwards. First contact sparks societal-wide transformation, the cosmic comparison, and the gift of self-knowledge.
At first contact, we meet “them” and find ourselves.
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