Achieving Peace with Aliens in Utopian Science Fiction
Aliens are a lot like "savages" or the "others" from Utopian fiction, which is fiction about an idealized society dreamt up by an author. While I feel Daniel Defoe's novel, Robinson Crusoe, is hardly a utopia/dystopic fiction since it's mostly based on reality, An alien culture or person could be like Crusoe’s savages, to form a conceit, since some aliens are most unlike savages. Conflict with aliens, which hopefully don't occur, requires a totally different approach than what humans are used to. In the 19th century utopia genre and earlier, before the advent of the science fiction genre, English authors have always assumed that technological supremacy was in England’s or in the heroine’s/hero’s favor. Also, the concept of a culture more advanced than ours has been explored in Utopian fiction, but to a limited extent: the hero/heroine always encountered something familiar and "below" English scientific prowess. This essay is broken into three parts: 1) how are aliens different or similar to Utopians? 2) how are Utopian “others,” aka. “the savages” (like in Robinson Crusoe) similar to aliens? And, 3) how should NASA further the dream of science fiction utopia? Which one should it choose?
As I explored in utopia fiction prior to the 19th century, human relations with the other, utopian societies led to mutual understanding, but sometimes this led to conflict. The conflict that occurred is going to be the topic of this essay and the ways in which it differed from the two novels by Niven with his various utopic/dystopic worlds. In Ringworld and The Mote in God’s Eyes, both of which are hardcore science fictions, advanced alien species are the ones with the advanced weaponry, technology, culture, etc and they outsmart us, if the game of survival is won by the most intelligent. Some would argue social Darwinism is illegitimate, and I am of the former camp in this case.
In Ringworld and The Mote in God’s Eyes, and NASA, the means of achieving solutions by the protagonists are not through war. War does not justify the goal’s end vision. War is not a game that can be played against aliens who are more cunning and developed than us. And this is shown in hardcore science fiction that entertain the idea of conflict arising between aliens and humans rather than cooperation and mutual curiosity.
In the science fiction genre, which needed the utopian genre to build its ideas from, aliens exist. In Ringworld and The Mote in God’s Eyes, aliens were either not encountered by humans before, or are common. But as far as technology is concerned, us humans respond in a way that is inferior to the aliens in Ringworld and The Mote in God’s Eyes. In Ringworld, the story begins with a crew of about five—three aliens and two humans—they set out for a mysterious object on a super advanced spaceship with two aliens, of whose cultures have long been in correspondence with human civilization. This is similar to New Atlantis by Francis Bacon and Isle of Pines in that the islands that they landed upon always had more than one traveler with the protagonist/narrator. The hero and heroine humans in Ringworld discover that the heroine was chosen by the alien because she’s incredibly lucky by the alien who built the ship—the puppeteer he’s called. This luckiness is what sets her apart, much like how the wealth of the empress in the utopic The Blazing World sets the empress apart; the emperess’s charisma with the hybrid humans and the emperor also is similar. Of course, in a world where one is totally lucky, the heroine of Ringworld can destroy all barriers in front of her, survive death most likely, procreate with the most ideal, rare mate, all of which she does, for better or worse.
The two humans in Ringworld are not at odds against the more advanced aliens because they have matured to an extent far beyond what Emanuel Kant points out in What is Enlightenment? The hero is around two-hundred years old while the heroine is still yet twenty-two, so imagine how wise he must be! Regardless, they’re past an infantile sense of dependence. Without the insecurity of dependence, the protagonists and aliens are wholly independent of one another, while the humans on the galactic worlds enjoy trading with the puppeteers and the other alien, warrior race, as merchants mostly. A superior extraterrestrial race of the so-called “engineers” built the ringworld, but they’re do not appear until the later sequels, adding to the king-of-alien species mystery of who-built-it, similar to Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama series.
The puppeteers, though advanced, are not as advanced as they would like to assume to be. The ringworld, which is the mysterious object in the sky they are bound for, is the new location of which the alien puppeteer, who’s the representative of his race, is desiring to occupy. The puppeteer-representative, as an incentive to the unique luckiness of the heroine, offers to her the advanced spaceship in return for the hero and heroine’s cooperation in exploring the relic which is the ringworld.
Similarly, the puppeteers from Ringworld, the moties in The Mote in God’s Eyes, and the Yahoos all are encountered by the protagonist(s) of each respective novel with curiosity. The humans those cases gradually begin to abhor and detest the “others.” But the mode of solving conflict is through extermination or war and kindling peace and cooperation are subdued voices in the protagonist’s persona.
In The Mote in God’s Eyes, the aliens, who are the moties, appear on the outside technologically inferior, which isn’t disproved at the end of the novel but instead, the humans are in ignorance of their own technological inferiority. Yet, the moties are at a strategic disadvantage from the perspective of the human general, because they lack metal. The narrator portrays this in a hidden way in the novel. The group of militant humans who wish to tactically analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the moties justify their desires for exterminating them by fermenting the fear that the moties may gain faster-than-light drive, or light-speed travel to say the least. But the humans in The Mote in God’s Eyes, (themselves limited and this is the first contact anyone has made with extraterrestrial life), are placed at odds in terms of point of view with the moties, who are also analyzing the humans: they are in effect blinded by a tainted window, so to speak. The moties try to steal the faster-than light travel by the covert, pet-like engineers, but fail. Eventually, the humans and moties attempt to come to a diplomatic agreement that would place each other’s race at their respective domains in space, which would allow for galactic peace and trade. This, however, is not in the interests of the human generals of the human fleet of battleships, much like the empress in The Blazing World who wants to do things her way and her way only.
The moties hide the fact from the humans that their different breeds, especially the engineers, are not in fact pets that they own. They are able to hide this because of a profound language barrier, and this is different from any of the utopian fiction before the 1900’s in that the engineers of the moties are able to take apart any human tool, technological assemblage and put it back together in minutes—this, humans, have never confronted before and so naturally the general of the space fleets is concerned. The human general of the space fleets is concerned of the motie’s potential for rapid expansion, and he doesn’t want to trade with the moties for fear that this would expose human technologies to the engineers.
The humans decide to cooperate on the condition that the moties never be allowed to have faster-than-light travel. The human admiral, who is the hero of The Mote in God’s Eyes, has a huge say in this.
Now, usually, when a group of explorers typically, in a utopia fiction, meet the utopians, the explorers’ initial state of wonder upon meeting them is with friendliness, but with the Yahoos and Moties, curiosity and friendship quickly waned. A lot of it was due to there being a language barrier in both cases. A similarity can be drawn of the relationship between the Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos in Gulliver’s Travels with the human reaction against the alien moties: the humans and Gulliver both have an “other” that is undesirable, an obstacle in the path to mutual understanding. This dilemma when in comparison between the two texts is similar because the Yahoos were being considered for extermination, as were the moties.
In contrast, Crusoe in Robinson Crusoe is the one who’s technologically superior to the “others,” for he has ships and gun powder while the savages had scraps of cloths and primitive knives, bows and arrows. But when Crusoe first encounters the Brazilian savage on his secluded-from-European-civilization island, he faces cannibalism from the savages who live on the continent; he is alone and so faces isolation from society (until he meets Friday), having to make do with what little he has; he has to reevaluate possessions that are treasures but to him, junk (aka. Spanish coin); and finally, he has to employ his intelligence and knowledge to survive. Crusoe is always, in an ethnocentric way, able to overcome any difficulty that any unsophisticated savage would be able to challenge him with, though at times, he narrowly escapes death. In short, the utopian novel is highly unlike the predicaments that the postmodernist hero/heroine(s) face.
Likewise, in Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World, the empress has a large armada and hybrid humans to fight for her, so she is the one who’s technologically superior. In The Blazing World, the lady who is found in the northern ice caps on her boat and who discovers a kind of paradise, she becomes empress; she learns of the different races of men who are part animal, part man, in this feminized utopia; she becomes wiser and more knowledgeable of the corporeal spirits who she is able to commune with; and she asks questions to them about the nature of matter, to which they reply and answer; then, she sends her armada of half animal, half-human against Europe and conquers the continent, becoming empress by the monarchies of Europe. She is in short, a dreamer of war, an absolutist, and a megalomaniac.
Unlike science fiction, these three aforementioned utopia fictions written before the 1900’s had conflict arising between the protagonists and the “others” out of a desire for expansion and the extraction of wealth—it was not for mutual understanding. This foresight of the existence of aliens, this extrasensory inkling of an almost certain, alien presence, may one day be replaced by the paradigm that aliens exist, but in utopian literature. A utopia on another planet is possible as explored in Ringworld and The Mote in God’s Eyes¸ which is the next and last segment of my essay: how will NASA achieve a colony that’s a utopic?
The first people who are going to encounter aliens will most likely be NASA, if it hasn’t already occurred. In various space programs that were created after WWII, namely the USSR’s and NASA, the purpose has always been to outdo the other, one’s adversary—space exploration was not always a major concern; we were taking baby steps. When confronted with aliens or competition from other space powers, NASA should not take it to heart that it is technologically inferior in some areas. NASA first began mainly because of the Cold War, and they took infamous German Nazi rocket engineers to make their rockets, so ethics hasn't been a concern, rather, the interests of our presidents in defeating the Soviets (Jennings). So, we set goals to out-do them. Russia was the first to send a man into space (Jennings). We won this mostly because we had a German, former Nazi rocket engineer who designed the Saturn V rocket that propelled us to the moon (Jennings). With a war-like attitude in exploring space going into the next era of space exploration, it will be difficult to establish a long-lasting community that is welcome to people of different nationalities.
As a contemporary issue in terms of funding and its purpose, with the new cold war looming, the long-term strategies of NASA is now to set up greenhouses on Mars, sending astronauts to the planet for the first time, and increasing the chance of meeting aliens. Once countries are past the idea of war and arrive at the conclusion that we are all brothers and sisters, the desire for achieving peace through wars, which is paradoxical, this will be out of the question as there will be a lot of extraterrestrial-real-estate to choose from. That is to say one day, humans will put our presence on Mars. Hopefully we will not do so in the midst of a second cold war with Russia, and are alleged enemy, China, of whom I think should be our allies.
NASA, like some of the science fiction that NASA aspires to emulate, draws its elements from American history; America was not always a world power and it didn’t have an industrialization era as early as England had its. Historically, the final frontier was the American west, not to NASA, however. But now, NASA has redefined that to being space (Jennings). We would conquer and colonize other planets, search for life elsewhere, and we would do so mocking soviet Russia and the third world all the way for being incapable. According to the official NASA website, NASA was founded “partially in response to the Soviet Union’s launch of the first artificial satellite the previous year… in 1958… [by President Dwight D. Eisenhower]” (NASA). Later, its purpose grew with its budget to put a man on the moon by JFK.
NASA can provide humans with the desire to create another utopia elsewhere, say, on a planet, an exoplanet, or a moon, in different ways than what the past utopian fictions portray, but it would be better to do so with cooperation from other 2nd world countries. The various settings of utopian fiction are so radically different than what’s out there in the “final frontier” (Will). What’s out there in space isn’t necessarily going to be top-rate real-estate. The utopia of the future can only be achieved by perceiving that the real people we should be worried about are not people at all, but aliens who are far more technologically superior to us. NASA has been a way of achieving a different kind of Utopia, one with potential to be radically different than Crusoe’s dytopic island.
Until recently, NASA spending has declined, perhaps as a result of there being no more cold war: “Our study revealed a clear downward trend in federal aerospace procurement and R&D expenditures during the past decade” (Hogan). NASA’s dream has always been to achieve space exploration to the extent that we at some point colonize other planets. But, what kind of society would be set up at these planets? Would the exoplanet weals/Utopias be much more advanced and transcendental compared to the societies back on earth? Or would they be similar to ours? Certainly, the United States, for instance, is somewhat of a utopia. The United States follows a utopian doctrine of nationalism, patriotism, religion, and it allows its inhabitants to follow things freely, for the most part. It is also a dystopia in the sense that we aren't perfect, and there are always faults to be found, which would be undesirable in a society, say, on Mars. It only makes sense that we spread our ideals to other planets, when the time comes. But, this could be detrimental and cataclysmic in a society where survival is far more paramount and difficult than it is on Earth. And this has been the subject of hardcore science fiction novels for quite some time.
Works Cited
Niven, Larry. Ringworld. USA, The Random House Publishing Group, 1970. Print.
Niven, Larry and Pournelle, Jerry. The Mote in God’s Eye. USA: Amazon inc., 1974. Kindle
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Hogan, Thor, Fossum, Donna, Johnson, J. Dana, and Painter, Lawrence S. “Scoping Aerospace:
Tracking Federal Procurement and R&D Spending in the Aerospace Sector.” Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2005. Web. May 5th, 2014.
Greenblatt, Stephen ed. The Norton Anthology: English Literature. New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, 2013. Print.
NASA. “About NASA.” May 11th, 2014. Web. May 13th, 2014 <http://www.nasa.gov/about/highlights/what_does_nasa_do.html#.U3A-ofldVCo>
Clarke, Arthur C. Rondevouz with Rama. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973. Print
Jennings, Will. Interview. Danny Apatiga’s interview with Will: about NASA and Russia. 2014.
Personal notes.
