Last night, I had the misfortune to “watch” this movie, though I put that in quotation marks since I spent most of the two hours looking at Internet stuff on my tablet. Even just listening to it and glancing at it, the film was clearly horrible, so I won’t waste time writing a detailed review, and I’ll keep this short and only touch on the important points. Suffice it to say, this was another strike-out for the Wachowskis.
Plot: The human race originated elsewhere in the galaxy and became space-faring millions of years ago. A vast empire was created and (unbeknownst to us) came to encompass the Earth. 200,000 years ago, the super-advanced space humans seeded Earth with human life so our planet could be a giant farm (reminiscent of what the Machines were doing in the Wachowskis’ other, vastly better film, The Matrix). Once Earth achieved 21st century levels of population and technology, the space humans planned to come back, kill all the Earth humans, and harvest our corpses to extract our life forces, which could be preserved, bottled, and sold as age-reversing beverages to other space humans. I’m being completely serious. The space humans have in fact done this mass farming process many times before on other planets throughout the galaxy, and the bottled life force industry is a major part of the space economy.
Mila Kunis is a lowly Earth-born human who doesn’t know about any of that at the start of the movie. She is poor and has a job cleaning toilets. The only thing unique about her is that her first name is “Jupiter” (the space humans also have a secret base on the planet Jupiter, hidden beneath the clouds). However, thanks to a huge coincidence, it turns out her genetic code is identical to the code of a space human queen who died. Counting up all the space humans, Earth humans, and primitive humans living on other farm planets, there are so many humans that the amount of possible genetic variability given the limited size of our genome has been “maxed out,” and genetic duplicates who are unrelated to each other are being born. Statistically speaking, this would indeed happen, but the human population would need to be in the quadrillions.
The space humans find out about Mila somehow, and the dead space queen’s feuding rich and powerful children start sending teams of armed aliens to kidnap her. Cue fight scenes with laser guns, aliens flying through the air, space ships, and all that schlock. It was pretty bad.
Analysis: Turning to the technologies that the advanced space humans had, here are my thoughts on whether we Earth humans might someday also attain them.
Humans will look young and old at the same time. The space humans achieved medical immortality long ago thanks to the bottles of liquid life force. Periodically drinking the liquid or dunk oneself into a bathtub full of it would cause the signs of old age disappear from one’s body, truly restoring it to a more youthful state. The key space human characters who are fighting over Mila Kunis are tens of thousands of years old due to long-term use of the elixir. However, they appear to have strange mixes of youthful and elderly traits.
I believe that technology (and not the consumption of the “life force” of other humans) will someday grant us medical immortality and the ability to reverse the aging process. Human beings are just machines (albeit very complex ones made of organic matter), and like any other machine, in principle periodic repairs could keep any human alive indefinitely. The techniques and technologies that we use in the future to fix our bodies will be primitive and ugly at first, but over time will become more sophisticated and finessed. I can envision a window of time starting maybe 100 years from now when life extension therapies are in wide use, and treated people have mixes of young and old traits. For example, you might see people in their 90s who have unusually good complexions thanks to mechanical hearts, and unnaturally thick heads of colored hair thanks to cloned, implanted hair follicles, but in every other respect, they would look like old people. Better technologies created later on will allow full body rejuvenation, meaning young/old mixes will probably disappear in the long run.
Floors will be able to turn transparent. There is a scene on one of the space ships where one of the evil space humans is trying to force Mila Kunis to marry him to finish the final step in his evil plan. When she refuses, he pushes a button on a remote control or something, and the floor that they’re standing on turns transparent like glass, so Mila can look down and see that her Earth human family is being held prisoner in a torture chamber one level below them. “Either marry me, or they die!” he then bellows.
This is actually an entirely plausible technology that could be created in the near future with massive OLED screens and multitudes of tiny cameras (basically, you’d be watching a live surveillance camera feed of the building level below you, but displayed on a screen covering your entire floor), or with nano-engineered building materials that can turn transparent or opaque depending on whether or not electric current is being passed through them (Google “electric glass” or “switchable glass” plus the keyword “bathroom”). Note that the Wachowskis also showcased this type of technology in the movie Cloud Atlas, but it was used to make walls transparent instead of floors.
Humans will be able to mind-control insects. There’s a scene early in the movie, shortly after Mila Kunis realizes that space humans are after her, when she seeks refuge at Sean Bean’s house. Sean Bean is actually a space human who lives on a farm somewhere in the Midwest, in an old house that is covered with beehives jutting out of all the exterior and interior walls. Bees fly all over the place, but they don’t sting Sean Bean because he has some kind of mental control over them. The shelves and tables throughout the house are covered in jars full of honey, meaning he probably makes money by selling them. Sean Bean served in the space human military before some kind of falling out with his commanders, which also resulted in him secretly moving to Earth to do beekeeping. As if this whole setup weren’t absurd enough, when the bees form a cloud around Mila, Sean says something like “Bees can sense human royalty,” so their behavior serves as proof that she’s genetically identical to the dead space human queen.
As I said in my Starship Troopers review, there’s no scientific proof that human or animal telepathy exists, but cybernetic brain implants could give rise to essentially the same ability through science. Theoretically, a human with a brain implant could wirelessly transmit his thoughts to a bee that also had a brain implant, and those thoughts would control its movements and actions. However, in light of the tediousness of installing implants into the pinprick-sized brains of bees or other insects, and of the lack of any useful applications for the technology, I doubt it will ever interest anyone but a few scientists doing proof of concept experiments.
It would be cheaper, easier and better to build purpose-built machines like bee-sized flying drones for this rather than to jerry-rig animals. Flying drones are constantly shrinking in size, and there’s no reason to think it won’t eventually be possible to make them indistinguishable from insects. Eventually there will be swarms of flying robot insects that can coordinate their movements and actions, and humans will be able to control them just as they can control simpler flying drones today. Eventually, technology could allow humans to control them by thought alone, as I’ve described.
Bee-like robot drones would have agricultural uses as crop pollinators and pest killers, and they could also perform mass surveillance and have law enforcement and military uses. Human brain implants would have a variety of uses, such as enhancing intelligence and the senses. As I said in my last Personal Future Predictions blog entry, I don’t think human brain implants will be common before 2100. Insect-sized robots will be invented much sooner since they’ll need less sophisticated technology and won’t be delayed by the FDA approval process (brain implants will probably be categorized as medical devices).
Humans and aliens will work together. The space humans have created a galactic empire that encompasses some non-human aliens. Some of them look like the stereotypical big-headed gray aliens, and they try to abduct Mila Kunis at the start of the movie. (There are also androids and human-animal hybrids in the movie, but whatever.) Other aliens are seen walking around inside space ships and cities on other planets, and the space humans appear at ease with them.
I think intelligent alien life exists elsewhere in the galaxy, and if we survive long enough to explore deep space, we will probably encounter them, or we will at least spot them at long range with our telescopes. However, I also believe we’ll discover that things unfold in the same basic order across the galaxy, with primitive organic life automatically arising on planets where the right natural conditions exist, an intelligent organic species evolving on a minority of those planets, followed by a minority of those planets being taken over by intelligent artificial life forms that the intelligent organic species invents, followed by the artificial life forms being the most successful at developing better technologies and colonizing space. We will find that the most powerful and most advanced alien species are basically machines (I say “basically” because they might be so advanced that they have characteristics that are not stereotypically mechanical).
Liberated from the slowness and imprecision of biological evolution, intelligent machines could rapidly re-engineer themselves to adapt to space and to other planets. Since some forms are inherently more functional than others (e.g. – tires work better when they’re shaped like circles instead of rectangles, regardless of what planet you’re on), convergent evolution would happen among artificial life forms that were spacefaring and free to do what they wanted. If our future civilization discovered aliens of equal or greater sophistication, we’d probably find many major similarities between our machines, though the organic life forms from their home planet would be quite different and incompatible with ours.
Instead of the Star Trek vision of the future where space exploration proceeds with humans calling the shots, and technology is still “dumb,” I think the reverse will be true, and our role will be more akin to that of a pet dog brought along by its human family on a road trip. The dog is not in charge, didn’t plan the trip, and is very stupid compared to the humans. The humans brought it along for sentimental reasons only. The dog has no real role to play on the trip and can’t exercise any control over what happens. Some small amount of resources (space in the car, money for dog food, space for misc. supplies like a lease and food/water bowls) is devoted to ensuring the dog’s comfort, but orders of magnitude more are devoted to supporting the human family (gas money, hotel fees, restaurant budget). After many hours locked in its pet carrier cage, the dog is able to get out when the car arrives at its destination. It is a strange, alien environment that the dog has trouble interpreting, but which the humans mundanely understand is just a beach. While at the beach, the human family and the dog all sit in the sand next to a different human family, who have brought along their pet cat. The dog is astounded as he has never seen a cat before, and vice versa. The two animals sniff each other while their human owners talk in their inscrutable, high-level language, exchanging more ideas in a few seconds than either the dog or cat could learn in a lifetime. Any attempt by the animals to fight with each other is quickly broken up by the humans, with no offense taken. The trip eventually ends, the dog gets packed back in the pet carrier, and the whole group heads back home. Does the dog want to stay at the beach or go back home? No one bothers to ask.
This is certainly not a romantic vision of future space exploration, but I think it’s likely an accurate one. Just as we will lose control over the Earth with time, it stands to reason we will lose control over space, and it further stands to reason we will encounter alien civilizations where the same course of events has played out, resulting in the same order of things.
Genetic copies of people become common. As mentioned, the plot revolves around the fact that Mila Kunis is a genetic doppelganger for a dead alien space queen, so all the queen’s evil kids want to kidnap her. Yes, as diverse as the human race is, there are limits to how many unique human individuals are allowable given all the different permutations of genes made possible by our genome. Also, keep in mind that not every gene affects observable physical traits, so two people could be externally identical even if a small fraction of their genes were different. But statistically speaking, the human population would need to be in the quadrillions for our species to have exhausted all of its possible genetic variability and for unrelated people to share the same genome (or even 99% of the same genome).
I doubt the human population will ever get that high, and I think what would muck things up well before then would be the introduction of novel genes into our species through genetic engineering, which would increase the amount of potential species diversity. However, genetic copies of people will become more common for an entirely different reason: cloning. Once the technology becomes available, some people will start cloning themselves, or dead loved ones, or other people they’re obsessed with (Angelina Jolie, Hitler, Einstein) and whose DNA they’ve obtained.