No aliens in the 'Verse...How do you feel?

POSTED BY: BWare42
UPDATED: Wednesday, February 8, 2006 03:25
VIEWED: 20169
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CHRISTHECYNIC

Friday, February 3, 2006 5:03 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Cybersnark:
(This is the reason I loved DS9; it was Star Trek that didn't play by the Star Trek rules. It had Ferengi family drama, Bajoran factionalism, Klingon internecine politics, Cardassian social revolution, human black ops. . . There were no "token" characters.)

I didn't like what they did with the Ferengi, greed was more or less a planet wide religion, larger than that actually, and it collapsed almost overnight.

Beliefs that strong don't fall that easily. The rest I'm with you on.

One of the things in Star Trek was that everyone (every species) is the same, Klingons love Shakespeare for example. In galactic politics, like on earth, only Nixon could go to China. Every planet or empire had gone through social revolution after revolution until the local version of the fittest won out. The show takes place after that point.

So after all of that sameness only the humans, one Vulcan, and one Klingon can be original? If it followed its own rule everyone would be just as diverse, but each culture would be centered around a different point. Yet it made other rules so that to do something that made sense required breaking the Star Trek rules.

Don't get me wrong, I like almost all Trek, but seeing variation in the other species was done too little.

BROWNCOAT1

Friday, February 3, 2006 5:21 PM

Personally I like the fact that Joss decided to go w/ an alien free universe. I prefer to keep the focus on humanity, its dynamics and how everyday people like Mal & crew deal w/ their enviroment. One of the things about Star Trek that kind of killed it for me was all the aliens & getting bogged down in their culture, etc.

I think that it is a bit naive to think that we are the only species in the universe & that Earth is the only populated planet. Of course if was an intelligent alien species I would avoid this planet & its inhabitants too.

__________________________________________

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Richmond, VA & surrounding area Firefly Fans:

http://tv.groups.yahoo.com/group/richmondbrowncoats/

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LIMINALOSITY

Friday, February 3, 2006 5:23 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by christhecynic: If it was God then the idea that there is no life on other planets is absurd. From religions where God is a compassionate perfect being to ones where God is a jealous highly flawed arrogant ass I have never heard of a single version of God (or the gods) that would leave all of the universe, save one spot, devoid of life.

Religions do tend to go for the slant that their believers are the ones chosen by God, so it's a pretty logical extention of that of train of thought to the idea that this is the only planet with life of any sort.

Shiny Trees! Yavanna made Shiny Trees!
Aztecs used the term firefly metaphorically, meaning a spark of knowledge in a world of ignorance or darkness.

CHRISTHECYNIC

Friday, February 3, 2006 5:25 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Arcadia:
also, I hate how aliens just become an exageration of one characteric or two. Vulcans are logical. Klingons are agresssive. The goa'uld are stinky thieves. Okay. That's nice?

I have to ask, do you watch Stargate? If you're talking about goa'uld as an entire alien race (instead of a culture in that race) that is quite false. At one point the SGC had three allies, the Asgaurd, the Jaffa rebellion, and members of the goa'uld species (tok‘ra). If you’re not talking about the whole species then you have to admit that the power structures of some cultures in real life are quite a bit like that.

Also in Star Trek while the Klingons were an exaggeration of aggressiveness the Vulcans were hardly an exaggeration of logicalness. I've seen quite a bit, though not all, of Star Trek and I can't think of a single logical Vulcan. If they're an exaggeration of anything it's the inability to admit failure to attain an ideal.

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Though I disagree with two thirds of your examples I agree with your point, it is irksome when aliens are just an exaggerated trait.

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I'm rambling so I will stop.

That rarely stops me.

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Happy friday, all.

Same to you.

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I've just been reminded of something. The show Babylon 5 had an episode where the religious leaders of various worlds were meeting. While there was significant variation in almost all cultures most if not all aliens had one world religions.

If memory serves the meetings went something like this:
"Allow me to introduce the high priest of my planet."
"Allow me to introduce the high priest of my planet."
"Allow me to introduce the high priest of my planet."
"This is a Hindu priest, this is a Catholic priest, this is a Lutheran priest, this is an orthodox rabbi, this is a Mohammedan priest, this is an Islamic priest, this is a Mormon priest, this is a Buddhist monk, this is a Baptist priest, this is a ..." (We have a lot of different types of Christians don‘t we.)

The idea seems to be that humanity itself is an exaggeration of a single trait, diversity if you're nice, rabid factionalism and schismatic practices if your not.

CHRISTHECYNIC

Friday, February 3, 2006 5:47 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by liminalosity:
Religions do tend to go for the slant that their believers are the ones chosen by God, so it's a pretty logical extention of that of train of thought to the idea that this is the only planet with life of any sort.

If that logic held then the only life of any sort would be the members of whichever particular religion you are talking about (and things necessary for/desirable to those believers.)

For example, either all non-Roman Catholics are figments of a deranged imagination or the Roman Catholic god creates non-believers in places very far away from Jerusalem and Jesus and the like.

Then again there might have been a point when people said, "Sure there could be other continents, but there can't be any life on them, we're the chosen of god."

Every religion that contends god is the only source of life seems obsessed with the idea that god creates people and things outside of the religion. Dolphins for example, lots of people like to talk about how smart dolphins are. Even if you think they are moronic it is hard to deny that they are sentient, yet they are not Christians, so by the argument that says there is no sentient life on other planets the Christian god didn't make them and Christians must therefore believe that dolphins must not really exist.

The argument simply doesn't hold. About the only thing exclusive religions unanimously agree on is that god created life sentient and otherwise outside of the initial reach of the religion. Perhaps one day a method of fluent communication with dolphins and crows will exist and there will be missionaries to the crows and dolphins.

Perhaps not, either way god created life outside the bounds of his religion. The things can't even understand the language (well actually both can be trained to understand some English and therefore probably other languages (like Hebrew and Aramaic), but not enough to understand the word God), but god made them.

That's just what god (according to exclusive religions) does, he makes heathens on top of heathens, he makes sentient life that is even further from him than heathens. He just goes around and makes stuff, lots of stuff.

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If everything is for the believers then why create stuff in America if the religion is in Israel?
Why because one day the religion will reach America.
Oh ... just like one day humanity will be on other planets?

ARCADIA

Friday, February 3, 2006 6:13 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by christhecynic:
I have to ask, do you watch Stargate? If you're talking about goa'uld as an entire alien race (instead of a culture in that race) that is quite false. At one point the SGC had three allies, the Asgaurd, the Jaffa rebellion, and members of the goa'uld species (tok‘ra). If you’re not talking about the whole species then you have to admit that the power structures of some cultures in real life are quite a bit like that.

I'm not entirely sure what you are saying here, but I will attempt to respond.

I'll start by saying that I have seen season 1-4 and 8 of stargate, with assorted episodes of other seaons here and there.

I admit, when it comes to intergallactic government, stargat did a pretty good job of creating power structures. The fact that the asgard bully the goa'uld through bluffing especially tickles me.

My point, however, didn't have much to do with that. For good or bad, it seems to me that all goa'uld (not necessarily Tok'ra, they come from a different mother so therefore they have a different "genetic memory" so they are not who I am talking about here) are liars, they steal, and they are power-hungry by default. I am glad that this is somewhat justified through genetic memory (the having a thousand hitlers in your head point). They made effective villians (well... not towards the end, but in the beginning, hell yes), but they aren't strong characters. Almost every singel one of them (I won't say all because as I said, I have not seen every episode of every season, and some of the episodes I have seen I saw so long ago that my memories of them are not completely there any more) is just a generic villian. They are fairly interchangeable.

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Also in Star Trek while the Klingons were an exaggeration of aggressiveness the Vulcans were hardly an exaggeration of logicalness. I've seen quite a bit, though not all, of Star Trek and I can't think of a single logical Vulcan. If they're an exaggeration of anything it's the inability to admit failure to attain an ideal.

Well, I never said that they were an successful exageration of perfectly logical beings. Perhaps they were a poke at Thomas Jefferson and the enlightenment era, I don't know... I chose the adjective logical because I was uncertain how many people posting actually watched star trek and I wanted to use something that is fairly well known about vulcans to make my point more universal. I was a Voyager girl, myself. It was a horrible show, but I was in elementry school/junior high and the captain was a girl so I thought it was awesome.

That said... I will conceed to you somewhat. Vulcans try to attain this ideal of being emotionless and logical all the time, and often they fail. At the same time, I will argue that if there had not been five star trek series and therefore hundreds of opertunities to explore them further, this is all any vulcan would have ever been: an annoying logic machine that sometimes breaks and refuses to admit it. They had a great potential to be interchangeable. This is just my opinion. Also, I will state again that I primarily watched Voyager, which isn't really the best show for Vulcans.

But I guess the whole point of my earlier rant was the same point you made with the religious comment. Humans are so diverse. Aliens, in most scifi I have seen, are so uniform. They are all loyal to one ideal, one religion... there is always one thing that defines them as an alien race. I see no reason why they should (aside from convenience -- it would be difficult storytelling to make a realistic alien culture). Humans are diverse, why shouldn't aliens be diverse? I guess Stargate attempted this with goa'uld v. tok'ra... but mostly, it doens't happen. That was my main point.

Quote:
The idea seems to be that humanity itself is an exaggeration of a single trait, diversity if you're nice, rabid factionalism and schismatic practices if your not.

That's an interesting idea. Definately something I hadn't thought about.

Peace.

"Objec

LIMINALOSITY

Friday, February 3, 2006 6:20 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by christhecynic:Then again there might have been a point when people said, "Sure there could be other continents, but there can't be any life on them, we're the chosen of god."

Hey Chris, Yup, crusading religions have done that acreoss the globe... if you insert the word 'intelligent' or 'ensouled'.

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Even if you think they [dolphins] are moronic it is hard to deny that they are sentient, yet they are not Christians, so by the argument that says there is no sentient life on other planets the Christian god didn't make them and Christians must therefore believe that dolphins must not really exist.

I'm a complete heretic who believes that what people refer to as soul is evolution. When communication within a species reaches the concept of compassion, bingo, 'soul'.

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Perhaps one day a method of fluent communication with dolphins and crows will exist and there will be missionaries to the crows and dolphins.

Ohhh, that's an image I hate to entertain. OTOH, the crows would just steal all the shiny, and divebomb the missionaries.

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That's just what god (according to exclusive religions) does, he makes heathens on top of heathens, he makes sentient life that is even further from him than heathens. He just goes around and makes stuff, lots of stuff.

Stuff for someone with membership in the club to feel superior to, which, yeah...I snagged this from your response to another poster...

Quote:
Also in Star Trek while the Klingons were an exaggeration of aggressiveness the Vulcans were hardly an exaggeration of logicalness. I've seen quite a bit, though not all, of Star Trek and I can't think of a single logical Vulcan. If they're an exaggeration of anything it's the inability to admit failure to attain an ideal.

I think our failure to understand that heirarchy doesn't quite work is showing.

Quote:
Oh ... just like one day humanity will be on other planets?

yeah, and we want our hot chocolate waiting for us when we get there, because we're going to need to sort through that stuff of ours, right away.

CHRISTHECYNIC

Friday, February 3, 2006 8:57 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Arcadia:
But I guess the whole point of my earlier rant was the same point you made with the religious comment. Humans are so diverse. Aliens, in most scifi I have seen, are so uniform. They are all loyal to one ideal, one religion... there is always one thing that defines them as an alien race. I see no reason why they should (aside from convenience -- it would be difficult storytelling to make a realistic alien culture). Humans are diverse, why shouldn't aliens be diverse? I guess Stargate attempted this with goa'uld v. tok'ra... but mostly, it doens't happen. That was my main point.

Actually I got that, but I nitpick, it's just the compulsion that I don't have enough tact to overcome.

I think the reasoning (and I'm not saying it is good reasoning) behind having alien cultures center on one ideal is that it is trying to expand the real world to the size of the universe instead of trying to stick the real world into a universe.

Often times one culture on earth will have one ideal or set of ideals they strive to and those ideals will bring them into conflict with other cultures. Instead of saying, "Each alien race has a diverse set of cultures," it says, "Each alien race is one culture."

But then it takes it a step further and says, "For the purposes of simplicity each culture has a single view."

Which is of course absurd.

The one guiding goal of the Roman Empire was order. They wanted to bring order to the world, one of the biggest insults you could throw was accusing someone of furthering disorder. Does that mean they all got along and worked together to bring order under one unified philosophy of how to do it? Hell no. They spent about half of their time killing each other.

In a typical sci-fi show a race with the goal of order would have worked out exactly how to go about it centuries before they showed up and there would be no infighting unless the plot required it explicitly. I don't care how much you believe in social evolution the idea that a single form of a single idea would eventually win out as the fittest for every single culture on a planet (for every planet) is absurd.

Which is what I think you were saying, more or less.

FERT1

Friday, February 3, 2006 9:31 PM

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As someone else-thread posted, aliens are too often used as shorthand stereotypes (all Klingons are stamped from this mold, all Vulcans from this mold, etc). I want a series that gives us some aliens with as much individuality as humans. Yeah, let humans be good, bad, and morally ambiguous, but let the other species do the same.

You just described Babylon 5. That was my first thought when I read your post. Think about it. Of the Centauri, the main characters you had on the show were Londo and Vir. Vir chose the high road, and Londo chose the low road. But...Londo wasn't entirely a villain. In fact, he was a very complex character whom you felt sorry for at times, even though he did some really despicable things. He was victim as much as villain, and in the end realized his mistakes, when it was too late, at least for him. He even had heroic moments. He was a very complex and layered character. He came across as very...human. All the characters on that show were 3 dimensional, and all evolved and grew as people, (so to speak). A very well done show if you've never seen it!

Now having said all that, I like Firefly just fine without the aliens. Why? Because it's original, and it makes a certain sense. Even if you believe there is alien life out there, when first exploring the universe, the likelihood of encountering it would be pretty slim. After all the tired old sterotypes and Star Trek aliens with speed bumps on their head, Joss's verse was quite refreshing, very new and different. That's one of the things I've always liked about Joss's projects. You can count on something new and refreshing, not the same old thing that has been rehashed a million times.

I've had an idea for some time for a storyline that I think would make a good SF book. Yes, it's very similar to an old Twilight Zone episode, but that is not what inspired me. The story would be of an alien invasion, similar to War of the Worlds, with cruel, heartless aliens that think nothing of killing off the people to take their planent from them. In the end, you would find out the invaders were from a place called Earth. What actually inspired me on that idea, was a friend telling me that our "top minds" had discussed and study the whole alien encounter thing, and decided that if aliens contacted us, it would never be for a good reason. It would be to mean us harm in some way. My reaction was, "Yeah, they think that because that's exactly what we [humans] would do." Then it hit me, you know, that would make a good story.

While I don't think Firefly needs aliens, I do believe in sentient alien life. I don't necessarily think it's in our own galaxy or even particularly close. As someone else mentioned, it would most likely be too far away for our species to ever meet, even with advanced space travel capabilities. The Universe is very vast. I think it's very egocentric to think we would be the only life or only intelligent life.

1. If you believe God designed the Universe, then as others have pointed out, it's a terrible waste of space - just doesn't make sense.

2. If you think there is no God and it's all evolution, then it still makes sense that life would evolve. It would almost have to evolve. It could and most likely would be very different from life on this planet. I even think scientist are pretty short-sighted to think that a planet would have to have a very similar atmosphere and climate to our own in order for life to evolve.

One of the main concepts behind the theory of evolution is that life adapts to the environment, not the other way around. Just because life on this planet could not live there, doesn't mean it couldn't have it's own ecosystem with creatures that evolved to live under those conditions. Am I making sense?

MICHAELANGELO

Friday, February 3, 2006 9:50 PM

Great thread, and i echo about 95% of y'all.

Adding aliens would ruin the show. Humans are strange & diverse enough.

Secondly, they cost too much! In a TV show they end up being humans with a bumpy nose or vestigial horns & yellow skin... ruttin lame. If you are gonna do aliens, *DO* aliens, not Joe Schmoe actor with a bit more makeup on.

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