“Star Trek” comes out later this week. In honor of screenwriter Damon Lindelof, an overrated talent at best, I have some sci-fi related rants prepared that I’ll whip out for today’s rainy day.
I wrote this a while ago, after watching “Prometheus”, a Lindelof project.
“I really hate the early astronaut theory.
I have an “open mind” about other bunkem such as the search for ghosts or various conspiracy theories and unsolved mysteries of the world. I even am interested in the idea of modern aliens and astronauts.
But early astronauts? Forget it.
The early astronaut theory is basically the idea that either our great human ideas or higher thought or even life itself is derived from some
First of all, there’s no evidence for this. So let’s get that out there right away.
Second, this is the worst pseudoscientific bullshit, akin to putting people on dinosaurs in a horrible attempt to match the Bible with the fossil record. This is creationism and intelligent design mascerading as science fiction. But it’s a hell of a lot worse.
At least many of religious faith accept God as ‘unknowable’ or at least mysterious. Imagining our ‘creators’ to be aliens brings back the problem of personification back up again.
Third, I hate these theories because in some way they really take away the majesty and brilliance of human potential. What, we can’t believe that humans built the pyramids? That life progressed from simple cells to Kim Kardashian over a billion years? That human emotions originate with humans and not some crazy alien bosses?
It’s infantile. It’s like we need a ‘father’ or ‘mother’ alien/god/engineer watching over us or guiding us. Because we are afraid of our own responsibility and independance.
This fear is something everyone must struggle with, I believe. Can we cope with our own indviduality, and self doubt, and find purpose from within?
Fourth, the early astronaut theory really just puts off the important existential questions, as opposed to answering them. It just makes us once removed from those ideas.
So if aliens made us, who made the aliens? If life was created on Earth intelligently and with intent, where did THAT life originate from?
Theologists have at least made attempts to answer this paradox, but what kind of lame ass answer can an EA Theory promoter give? I guess he could give the same one, that the aliens are beyond our understanding or something. But that’s facecious, since the novelty of the EA Theory is that little green men are like the Jews of the universe, secretly controlling and manipulating everything.
If EA theorists admit or decide that the motivations of origins are beyond our understanding (ie, fourth dimensional aliens who do not contemplate time or life existing in ways that we have not yet fathomed) then all of the sudden we are just getting bogged down in symantics, “aliens” or “early astronauts” suddenly just becoming synanimous with “meteors carrying amino acids” or “the magic of space” or “God.” The terms and in fact the theory itself becomes meaningless, basically reduced to “something happened that preceded life.”
One more final thing: the EA Theory is a useful tool in the sci-fi world because it accomplishes one thing big thing, which has nothing to do with big ideas and everything to do with the limitations of human (film) art. That thing is: it explains why most aliens in the Universe look like humans with funny foreheads, because the universe was seeded with similar DNA. That’s also an explanation of how our sci fi Universes contain a suspicious amount of relatable alien lifeforms. It helps explain why a giant slug named Jabba the Hutt would be sexually attracted to a human female princess. Or why Vulcans and Romulans are the same fucking thing.
The EA Theory says more about us than it does about the truth. Proponents are exposing their hand, demonstrating their cultural bias with is dependant on western science fiction and pop culture tropes, and Biblical/classical notions of authority and intent.”
Culture Time 