The Barbarians at SETI

 

Hey, who’s up for a little existential dread wrapped up in nostalgia by way of a 90-minute toy commercial featuring blood, body horror, and genocide? 

Whenever nostalgia-based content creators bring up pieces of media that “traumatized” us as kids, there’s a fairly familiar list of usual suspects and often with Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal at the tippy top. Other entries on the list may include The Transformers Movie, The Neverending Story, and The Secret of NIMH, among many others of that particular era. I saw these films back in the day (or at least parts of them before turning off the TV in horror) and they certainly had an effect on me not unlike that on my peers. However, there’s one movie that it seems no one talks about that definitely had an impact on me as a kid, and that’s the G.I.Joe Movie from 1987. What separates this one from the others on those lists is a kind of double-whammy, scaring me as a kid and then unexpectedly giving me severe existential dread as an adult. 

Casting my mind back to around 1987 or maybe 1988, I was in my neighbor’s basement watching cartoons with their kids, and the G.I.Joe Movie was on. Originally slated for theaters, the poor box office performance of Hasbro’s previous animated outing (Transformers) led the film to be released directly to video and ultimately to television in a serialized format. The movie centers around the titular Joes going up against an ancient race hiding away under a dome of ice in a frozen wasteland. Called Cobra-La, these ancient serpent worshippers plan to launch a bio-terrorism attack on the whole of humanity. Massive spore-pods are launched into orbit. Upon ripening, the spores will descend upon the Earth, infecting everyone they come in contact with, reducing humanity to mindless beasts. I think this was my first exposure to the concept of a fate worse than death. Seeing these ordinary adults going about their day violently transformed into scaly, savage subhumans is pretty dark for a 6 or 7-year old kid. It was certainly a stark contrast to the Joes’ usual goofy conflicts with the ruthless terrorist organization Cobra, who only wanted to rule over the civilizations of the world rather than outright destroy them. I guess this was also my first introduction to the idea of different kinds of evil, those who wanted to take over the world versus those who wanted to watch it burn. 

Fast-forward many years, maybe to the last five or so. I’m a grown man in his forties watching random movie clips and reviews on YouTube. The G.I.Joe movie came up and reignited memories of the absolute body horror that was Cobra Commander’s origin story, among other things like the aforementioned mindless beasts. This time, though, something else caught my attention, something that went over my head back in the 80’s. Cobra-La’s main gimmick throughout the movie is that their technology is organically-based. In other words, they don’t build things so much as grow them. Nearly everything at their disposal is alive. Even door keys are odd-looking beetles and rolling out the red carpet involves a literal army of little crab-like creatures. Kind of puts the Flintstones in a new light, doesn’t it? 

Cobra-La is ruled over by Golobulus, voiced by the original G.I.Joe himself, Burgess Meredith. Around the halfway point in the movie, he gives us an exposition and lore dump about how Cobra-La came to be as it is. 40,000 years ago, they lived in harmony with nature, engineering it to their will and establishing an advanced civilization in this period of pre-human history. Climate change, specifically an ice age, brings their entire way of life to a screeching halt and forces them to take refuge under an ice dome. Following this is the rise of what Golobulus calls “the barbarians”. He’s of course talking about humans as we’re shown a pack of Neanderthals poking around a forest in search of their next meal. The flashback makes a time skip worthy of 2001: A Space Odyssey and shows humanity launching the space shuttle. Narration from Golobulus highlights a key difference between the age of Cobra-La and these pesky barbarians known as man. Whereas Cobra-La used organic matter as its foundation, human beings harnessed inorganic materials like stone and metal.* 

Let’s think about that a minute. There we were, eons ago, poking around the woods eating grubs and fruits and whatever else we could forage. Somewhere along the way, one of our ancestors had an epiphany. If we took a stick and sharpened it to a point using a rock, we could take on larger prey and enjoy a greater feast. Then, someone hit on the idea of taking those rocks and using the antlers and bones of that prey to shape them into whatever we needed to hunt ever-bigger prey. Following that, someone else noticed a special kind of rock, one that’s got shiny bits in it, and who doesn’t love a bright, shiny object? One discovery leads to another, and next thing you know we’re using spools of copper wire and these weird things called semiconductors to send messages over great distances. Needless to say, as far as we know, no other species on our planet has made these discoveries, much less built on them to a point of manipulating electromagnetic radiation to communicate. Some animals use tools, it’s true, and whales have a surprisingly wide-reaching communications network, but that’s hardly competition in the tech sector… unless we’re vastly underestimating the whales and Star Trek IV is dead on the money. 

Speaking of alien intelligences, SETI, the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence, casts a fairly broad net in their search for life beyond our own world. Primarily, though, they’re interested in establishing communication with alien civilizations that have reached at least the point of sending radio waves through space. I mean, if you sank all that grant money into leasing time on a massive radio telescope, that’s where you’d focus the most of your efforts. That’s not entirely fair. There’s actually a decent precedent for the notion that our first contact with an intelligence beyond our solar system could be in the form of telecommunications, namely the famous Wow! Signal, detected in 1977 and originating from somewhere in the constellation of Sagittarius. While we don’t know what the signal necessarily “said”, the fact that it was such a strong signal indicates it being more than some natural phenomena like a charged hydrogen cloud or one of many other potential explanations floating around since the discovery. 

I’m firmly, ardently of the belief that we are far from alone in the universe. Given the billions and billions of galaxies, each with billions and billions of stars, with billions of planets in each galaxy, it would be an astronomical impossibility for our little blue marble to be some grand exception to the rule by having life on it. Of course, we have to talk about the word “alone” in this context. As for what kind of life is out there in the universe, I’m in Camp Sagan in that while there’s most certainly life beyond our home star’s Oort Cloud, the likelihood of that life having visited us and walking among us is a little sketchy. The distances are vast enough for radio messages to take lifetimes at best, much less spacecraft. That is, life could exist, just not the kind that’s followed the same path that we have. 

This is tapping on the lid of a very, very big can of worms in terms of answering the question of whether or not we’re alone in the universe. The Fermi Paradox, The Drake Equation, The Dark Forest, and probably most concerning is The Great Filter. The Great Filter is the notion that there may be some great barrier in the progress and development of any intelligent species that’s either extremely difficult to overcome, or downright impossible. This barrier can be most anything from exhausting resources to self-destruction by warfare. Essentially, it’s a point at which a civilization cannot sustain itself and either needs a massive paradigm shift or collapses on itself in extinction. As far as humanity goes, there’s two possibilities, the Filter either being ahead of us, or hopefully behind us. Maybe harnessing those inorganic materials and developing technology was the Filter. Maybe leaving this planet or at least getting a start on asteroid mining is the Filter. 

Of course, that leaves the final question of whether or not we’re the first to get past the Filter. 

*I learned while writing this of a film from 1959 called The Atomic Submarine, which features humanity dealing with an aquatic UFO that is able to heal itself from attack by way of an organically-based technology.