Jurassic Park: fascination with dinosaurs turns to fascination with computers
How Jurassic Park inspired a generation of nerds.
I won’t belabor the phenomenon that was Jurassic Park. Obviously, it’s popular, and we now have moved into soft-reboot sequels. Personally, I think we should get into prequel territory.
Naturally, like most kids I was massively into dinosaurs when I was young and I was just old enough when the original Jurassic Park movie came out to be able to see it. I was also just old enough to be interested in computers at the dawn of the PC and the Internet at the same time.
Plenty of commentary on the original film focuses on how a major theme of the movie and the book are on the assumption of technology being able to control nature, which is a bad assumption, made more poignant by people getting eaten alive by monsters.
I’m sure such topics will be discussed until the end of time in every communicative form humans possess or will create. I’m not going into that here, instead I’m leaning towards the opposite. Jurassic Park, while pointing out the hubris of technology, made a generation of young people fascinated with technology.
The Crays
Though not mentioned in the movie, in the book it’s noted that InGen has purchased three Cray computers in order to do their gene sequencing.
As a seventh grader reading the book, it fascinated me. What is a Cray? Why are they so special?
It inserted a new idea into my brain that there were computers that weren’t like other computers, and didn’t behave like Windows 3.0 and AOL dial-up.
It wasn’t a huge leap to understand that a “supercomputer” was a different beast. Some computers are big and super fast, understood. But no. I wanted to know how they worked.
In my later years, I was fortunate to meet an engineer who actually programmed on Crays for Boeing. He even lent me his reference manual.
What I learned from this person was that Crays were designed to be especially attentive to heat. If you don’t know, heat is bad for computers. Cold is much better, so the Crays were specifically designed to do operations that reduced heat build up.
This is brilliant, though at times was frustrating for programmers, but also something that a new generation of IoT and wearables programmers have to consider. More importantly, it was something I didn’t pay much attention to, but one line in Jurassic Park made me fascinated with this one machine, which led to a friendship, that led to this lesson in how to program responsibly.
I still want one.
Math is Cool
Ian Malcolm is cool, and they upped it for the movie by casting Jeff Goldblum to play him.
Through Malcolm, the book introduced this fascinating idea of chaos theory and how complexity arises out of simple iterations.
Fractals look pretty and I’m sure there are plenty of criticisms of chaos theory, I’m hardly literate on the subject beyond the sentence I typed above. Let me explain despite my ignorance.
First, the idea above introduced an extremely powerful idea into my mind. One that has stayed with me and is explored in more detail in books like Godel, Escher, Bach and Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, as well as argued against in books like Advent of the Algorithm. Now, I’m not too concerned with the details of dialogue for this Medium post, but much like the Cray, I don’t think I would have ever been motivated to investigate them more fully if I didn’t think Ian Malcolm would have.
Second, Ian Malcolm made science look cool. He was interested in math because he thought it was interesting. Not because, that’s what you do — just get an education — you like wearing black leather, like flirting with women, and you like complex systems research, then go for it.
Third, Ian draws out that you can use insight even if you’re not an expert. Malcolm is a mathematician (Actually “Chaotician” Corey), yet his benefit in the story is essentially the tone of “Wait, what did you just say?” because he’s just a smart guy.
As the fun line in the movie goes “Yeah, but John, when The Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don’t eat the tourists.”
He didn’t need to be an expert in genetics, corporate structures, or security, he only needed to turn his gaze at the current problem and, most importantly, trust his evaluation of the situation. This is displayed as him being a loudmouth (“I really do hate that man”), but it is in fact a rebuttal to the fallacy of the “Argument from Authority.”
Simply put, if you’re right, you’re right. Doesn’t matter if you can’t clone a T-Rex. Being 13, it’s a good lesson when every adult will tell you, “because I said so” when challenged. Though you may have had to back down then, it’s an important lesson that authority can indeed be questioned when insight is applied.
The follow-up is simple — what else can be questioned?
It’s a UNIX system
This is one of the most hated tropes in film: the over-visualization of computer work. Lex remarks that it’s a “UNIX system” when anyone who has worked with UNIX knows this isn’t what it looks like.
It’s a narrative device, just like in Hackers and, another Goldblum film, Independence Day. We’ve come along way since WarGames, of course even that movie employed an auditory narrative tool.
Nedry demonstrates that the computer systems are in fact more powerful than Muldoon’s game-keeping skills. With a click, Nedry is able to shut down the park. He has access to everything, not that you would want physical access, which Nedry unfortunately learns. He learns it by being eaten alive, if you forgot.
Fellow getting-eaten-alive-learner, Ray Arnold has a measure of authority over Hammond and Muldoon despite their corporate and physical authority over him.
Finally, Lex, a young teenager, helps save everyone’s lives with a few clicks. While this is short-lived, it was still necessary in the moment (in the movie Timmy is too dumb to hand Sattler the shotgun. Seriously, rewatch this scene).
I don’t think this is outside Crichton’s and the movie’s intent. Technology is extremely powerful, so these situations demonstrate technology’s power and vulnerability simultaneously.
However, for a young kid with no power, suddenly it becomes clear that since dinosaurs no longer exist (RIP), technology is the true power, and you got a lot of time on your hands as a kid, so wouldn’t it be fun to learn MS-DOS commands, C++, and HTML?
Final Iteration
Jurassic Park is an insanely good movie and (dark) book. It scared the shit out of me as a kid and exposed me to a lot of adult ideas that maybe I wasn’t ready for at the time.
Though it was a Spielberg blockbuster, it conveys a number of powerful ideas beyond things exploding (I know he isn’t Michael Bay). Crichton was the co-screenwriter (even started the story as a screenplay), so much of his more long-winded diatribes remain but are succinctly put into the film, keeping its thematic ideas intact.
One major topic in computer science is “side effects.” This isn’t meant in medical terms to mean necessarily bad things, just the simple question of “What else occurs?”
The side effect for this film, while instilling me with fear of nature and that a velociraptor can kill me at anytime, also, even though he’s the bad guy, made me want to have Nerdy’s skill at computers and made me fascinated with computers more than dinosaurs.
Perhaps that’s just where I was going to end up anyways, but the idea that a computer can control a dinosaur is very powerful, and makes a young kid wonder, what else can computers do?
