THE EARWORM REVERBERATION: AN EXPECTATION OF EXTRATERRESTRIALS

In “The Earworm Reverberation,” Season 9, Episode 10, Raj talks of the work of the United Nations, Department for Outer Space Affairs.

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“The United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) is the United Nations office responsible for promoting international cooperation in the peaceful uses of outer space. . . . It also maintains a twenty-four-hour hotline as the United Nations focal point for satellite imagery requests during disasters and manages the United Nations Platform for Space-based Information for Disaster Management and Emergency Response (UN-SPIDER).”

—Unoosa.org (website for the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs)

“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own. . . . With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter . . . At most, terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this Earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.”

—H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (1898)

Alien Invasion

A host of alien spectres have haunted humans for decades, ever since H. G. Wells opened his 1898 novel, The War of the Worlds. The story starts with the most superb opening in the entire history of science fiction, and with the promise of alien invasion. The Martians in Wells’s book are agents of outer space, a space that powerfully shatters our human domain. The War of the Worlds is the greatest and most influential of all alien contact stories and is a Darwinian fable on a universal scale.

One of the main points of The War of the Worlds was that Wells was truly annoyed at the idea of the “becoming of man” or the contemporary theory of the origin and evolution of human society. So, his book begins with a quote from Johannes Kepler on the topic of life on other planets: “But who shall dwell in these worlds if they be inhabited? . . . Are we, or they, Lords of the World? . . . And how are all things made for man?” The book becomes a battle between Earth and Mars, humans and Martians. And to underline Wells’s point, the narrator of the story of this struggle for survival is a philosopher, writing a thesis on the progression of moral ideas with civilization. The narrator’s assumption of a bright future is rudely blown apart in midsentence by the brutal natural force of evolution in the shape of the Martian attack.

Wells had been well aware of the possibility of alien life for some time. He had contributed to the extraterrestrial debate in 1888 at the Royal College of Science on the subject Are the Planets Habitable? He had also written essays in support of fellow authors on the topic of possible alien life, such as Kepler, French writer Camille Flammarion, and American businessman Percival Lowell, whose wrong-headed obsession with “evidence” of life on Mars had recently reached Europe. Rather than being a whimsical work of fiction, The War of the Worlds demolishes the idea that man is the peak of evolution. Instead, Wells creates the myth of a technologically superior alien intelligence.

Mars is a dying world. Its seas are evaporating, its atmosphere melting away. The entire planet is doomed, so, as Wells writes in The War of the Worlds, “to carry warfare sunward is, indeed, their only escape from the destruction that generation after generation creeps upon them.” So the terror of outer space is brought down to Earth. Wells delivers repeated reminders of “the immensity of vacancy in which the dust of the material universe swims” and evokes the “unfathomable darkness” of space. Life is portrayed as precious and frail in a cosmos that is essentially deserted.

The modern ideas of alien invasion and contact, such as those featured in The Big Bang Theory episodes “The Earworm Reverberation” and “The Large Hadron Collision,” owe everything to Wells. The distinctive physiology and intellect of Wells’s Martians made them the prototypical aliens. Their Tripod crafts tower over men in body, as the vast intellects of their occupants tower over human intelligence. Somewhat like Sheldon (physically frail, but mentally intense), the Martians and their superior machines are instruments of human oppression. Their weapons of heat rays and poison gas are dehumanizing devices of mass murder. All attempts at contact are futile, furthering the idea of the aliens as an unrelenting force of outer space.

In fact, since Wells, alien invasion has become such an inexhaustible topic for fantastic film and fiction that we expect them to head over the horizon at any moment. Alternatively, as American anthropologist Loren Eisley powerfully suggests, there may not be aliens dwelling in space at all: “So deep is the conviction that there must be life out there beyond the dark, one thinks that if they are more advanced than ourselves, they may come across space at any moment, perhaps in our generation. Later, contemplating the infinity of time, one wonders if perchance their messages came long ago, hurtling into the swamp muck of the steaming coal forests, the bright projectile clambered over by hissing reptiles, and the delicate instruments running mindlessly down with no report . . . in the nature of life and in the principles of evolution we have had our answer. Of men elsewhere, and beyond, there will be none forever.”

I’ve sometimes used the example of Superman to illustrate the point about the influence of H. G. Wells on the modern idea of alien invasion. The Man of Steel was born as Kal-El on the alien planet of Krypton. His parents, Jor-El and Lara, learn of Krypton’s imminent destruction, sounding exactly like the kind of entropic decay Wells envisioned for Mars. So, Jor-El builds a spacecraft to carry Kal-El to Earth. Now, according to Superman #132, Krypton was three million light years away from our home planet. Cosmically speaking, that’s not so far. But it’s hardly next-door neighbor, either. Over twenty other galaxies sit between Superman’s world and our Milky Way. What, we might wonder, inspired Jor-El to send his son Earthward? Let alone the exacting logistics of launching a rocket on a light year’s trajectory in this direction, and given the certain billions of planets between Krypton and here, and assuming there are probably thousands of civilizations per galaxy, you get a good idea of the poor thinking behind the plan.

Alien Invasion

So, what of the work of UNOOSA, the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs? Howard’s comment on their work is “Mm, boy, that’s one of those jobs that’s boring, boring, boring, then, oh, God, where’s the memo with what we do now?” And yet the expectation of alien invasion has developed little since The War of the Worlds. Wells said nothing about alien culture. Martian culture seems bestial, wasted away by some entropic decay and whittled down to nothing more than a barbarous justification to invade Earth. And the Martians have little interest in the many forms of human culture. Instead, like vampires, they are intent only on human blood. And this pared-down rationale for human oppression inspires readers of The War of the Worlds into loathing the Martians and has greatly influenced how we think about the latent power of alien invasion on Earth, like an unsolicited natural selection from outer space.

Wells’s Martians are inhabitants of a dying planet, which is fast winding down into desert. But this exceptional case for alien invasion, within our solar system, has been thoughtlessly adopted many times. Writers of film, fiction, and comic books have mostly aped the same invasion myth, but without truly addressing the exceptional case Wells made for the Martians. Not only that, but in an attempt to eclipse the master and his Martians, writers attributed ever greater power to aliens. And they gifted to Earth the promise of unimaginable riches, a glittering prize of a planet not only of value to the small desert world of Mars, but for any imaginable civilization in the Galaxy, and beyond.

The impact of real alien contact would depend on factors such as the method of discovery, the nature of the aliens, and their location relative to the planet Earth. With these factors in mind, the Rio Scale has been developed to get a better picture of the potential results of contact. One study, by astronomer Steven J. Dick at the US Naval Observatory, looked at the cultural impact of alien contact by considering cases of similar significance from the history of science, such as the profound scientific revolutions associated with Copernicus and Darwin. Dick’s study suggests that impact would be more likely from radio-based contact than a more dramatic visit from alien craft. And his study also rejects the commonly used analogy of European colonization of the Americas as an accurate model for data-only contact.

The actual distance between two contacting civilizations is also a factor. When you think about the cultural impact of alien contact, historical examples help. They show that the greater the physical distance from the contact point, the less the contacted culture sees it as a threat to itself and its civilization. So, in this case, H. G. Wells is right again. Contact occurring within the solar system, and especially on Earth itself, is going to be the most disruptive and negative for humanity. Should there be any aliens in outer space, of course. On a smaller scale still, people living near the contact epicenter would suffer a greater effect than those living farther away. Studies suggest contact with multiple epicenters would cause a greater shock than one with a single epicenter, which is no doubt why many invasion stories feature multiple epicenters, such as a series of alien motherships sitting above many of the Earth’s major cities.

Luckily, dear reader, scientific protocols have been drawn up detailing the course of action you need to take in the event of alien contact. These include what to do after receiving a message from an alien source, whether or not to send a reply, and thinking about the long-term consequences of the message. As an example, here is what you do on receiving an alien message:

It could be you!