Why “Independence Day” and most alien invasion stories are outdated

Alien invasion movies have been around since movies like “The Day the Earth Stood Still” in 1953 and “War of the Worlds” in 1951. Stories of alien invasions predate the movies. War of the Worlds was originally broadcast on the radio in 1938, for example.

Often these films have undertones of whatever is freaking people out at the current time. The theme of “The Day the Earth Stood Still” was nuclear weapons. The terrible remake with Keanu Reeves, warns of the dangers of pollution and climate change. The “War of the Worlds” remake with Tom Cruise played on the fear of terrorism in a post-911 world.

The motivations of most of the alien invasion forces, however, are either conquest or an alien race in pursuit of natural resources. Remember the series “V” from the ‘80’s? The reptile aliens just wanted all our water.

The motivation for the aliens in “Independence Day” is presumably colonization, which is ridiculous.

Those themes have become outdated due to recent scientific discoveries, but the genre ignores them because the reality is much less interesting.

Here are a few reasons why an alien invasion would look much different, if it happened at all:

1. Aliens don’t care about our water. They probably don’t care about us. We used to think that the water on Earth was very uncommon, so naturally aliens would want it. That all changed in 2015 when NASA confirmed that Mars has flowing water. NASA has since said the solar system is flowing with water — on at least 2 dozen planets, moons or asteroids. Jupiter’s moon Ganymede is thought to have more water than Earth, with an ocean 10 times deeper than Earth’s.
   If the building blocks of life are as common as we think it might be, aliens don’t need to invade Earth for our resources. That’s a long way to travel to water and minerals that are everywhere.
2. Drake’s equation attempts to calculate the number of alien civilizations that we may be able to detect, which turns out to be a lot. Even if you were to update Drake’s equation by adding an extra variable to account for the estimated lifespan of a civilization before it destroyed itself, that still leaves a lot of potential civilizations. If life in the universe is as common as this equation suggests, there’s a lot to keep an alien civilization busy. We wouldn’t matter to them.

1. The Fermi Paradox attempts to answer the question, “Where is everyone?” given the large number of potential alien civilizations suggested by Drake’s equation. There are a lot of suggested answers to the Fermi Paradox, among them that alien civilizations don’t want to be found, everyone is too far away from each other to communicate, we’re too different to recognize when the other is trying to communicate, that we’ve been hidden from everyone by our “zoo keepers” until we come of age or aliens have visited or are visiting us now, but we just don’t know it (more on that later).
2. E = mc 2. Interstellar travel is difficult and only accessible once a civilization reaches a certain advanced level of knowledge. Even then, it takes a very long time to go anywhere due to the immense distances. Our nearest neighboring star, Proxima Centauri, is 4.24 light years away! Even if a civilization figured it out, the distances are formidable and the mass to move the enormous ships we see in sci fi movies would not only take unrealistic amounts of energy, they’d be impractical.
3. The Great Filter, which is part of the Fermi Paradox, suggests there is an unknown point in the development of every civilization that prevents it from progressing. It could be that nuclear war or a runaway AI destroys it or an existential viral outbreak. Or possibly every civilized world is doomed to be destroyed by one of the many natural dangers in the universe — asteroids, solar winds, radiation, dying starts, etc.

Artificial Intelligence, Robots and Transhumans

Let’s assume aliens are prevalent in the universe and that interstellar travel is possible and easy (wormholes?) and that aliens would want to come to Earth to explore or conquer. Their most likely form wouldn’t be bug-like or any other kind of alien we see in science fiction. They would most likely send an artificial intelligence or at least an augmented being or what we would call a Transhuman.

Any civilization that got advanced enough to travel through the galaxy would likely have developed probes, robots and artificial intelligence. We’re a very new spacefaring world and we already have all 3 — even if they are very basic. In 30–40 years, these will all be much more advanced. That’s a blink of an eye on an historical timeline. At that point, we will hopefully have infant bases on the moon and Mars and just starting to move out of the solar system.

Voyager 1 was the first an only human made probe to leave the solar system. Yuri Milner and Stephen Hawking’s Breakthrough Starshot and it’s $100 million in funding could be the next. There could be many more to follow, but it’ll be a long time after that humans follow the probes into deep space.

Milner’s project aims to send a wafer-sized chip propelled by lasers to Alpha Centauri. In the coming centuries interstellar travel is most likely to be ships the size of a grain of sand, outfitted with advanced artificial intelligence to scout out the stars. Possibly aided by self-replicating nano factories that can use local elements to make what’s necessary to continue exploring.

Given technology’s progression, these are the most likely travelers through space, not the continent-sized invading dreadnoughts from science fiction. Aliens could be exploring our world right now and we wouldn’t even know it.

What do you think? Are there any alien civilizations? If they came here, what would they look like?