The Sci-Fi and Commentary of Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri
With science and technology currently on a rising exponential progression, and with many popular public figures like Elon Musk advocating their necessity, colonising the cosmos, creating self-aware AI and stumbling upon extraterrestrial life are no longer fever dreams you would find in the pages of science fiction. Of course, they aren’t possibilities that would materialise in a few years either, but the thought that the ideas, resources and motivation could easily align themselves as an objective of humanity after some decades is not one of whimsy.
Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri is a turn-based strategy computer game that was released in 1999 by developer Firaxis, and much like the team’s other franchise, the Civilization games, it has the player choose one among many competing factions to play as, shaping their decisions throughout the game. What makes Alpha Centauri distinct from its peers, though, is its setting and its incredibly evocative Sci-Fi writing, which has been compared to the works of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick.
Let’s dive into the specifics of the future that Alpha Centauri presents humanity with.
The Introduction
The game’s opening cinematic tells us about the Unity, a faster-than-light starship that holds ten thousand crew and colonists, which is dispatched to the nearest star system from our own, the Alpha Centauri system. The Unity is a collective effort of the United Nations that decide to save humanity from the wars, poverty and famine that plague the Earth. As the Unity departs Earth in the year 2060, its course is set to the planet Chiron.
The Unity closes in on its destination, when rising tension among the various crew members leads to incisive division, with ideological extremists managing to take hold of the minds of a considerable amount of the crew. An incidental engine reactor failure and the conspired assassination of the Captain of the Unity accelerates the fragmentation, and the ten thousand crew members are split into Seven factions that have their own ideas to preserve humanity. They all leave each other to their own means as they each manage to crash land on Chiron.
Planetfall and its aftermath
While the game’s seven factions have been streamlined and abstracted to fit the needs of gameplay, they are very much fleshed out and realistic depictions of their ideological inclinations. The factions include ideologies that endorse military might, scientific progress, alien co-existence, driven economies and so on.
Where the game truly elevates itself is the technology tree, which is the list of technologies that you’d be able to research and invent throughout the game. The technologies that are included are provocative in many ways, allowing you to even build an Orwellian surveillance state that thrives on Totalitarian systems, or a pacifist nature-loving nation that aims to co-exist with the xenoflora of Chiron. You can research technology that allows you to engineer newborn infants with apparatus that can boost their central nervous system, or use the same technology to plant a kill switch inside drone workers who feel discontent and are likely to rise in rebellion.
The game’s systems and mechanics let you envision the future of humanity in almost any way you wish. Social engineering and diplomacy play vital roles, and your stance against native life-forms, be they primitive or intelligent, informs what lies in store for the rest of the universe, and for humanity itself.
The commentary
The game, through its gameplay, succinctly allows us to hold up a mirror to our own present. It raises questions on Xenophobia, our own egotistical notion that our higher intelligence grants us dominion over the stars, on society and how we could implement technology that would render any ideals of democracy and human rights obsolete, and so much more.
With our technology rapidly progressing, and as many new moral and ethical dilemmas present themselves to us, these questions are not only important but essential.
It’s been suggested by many free-thinkers, philosophers and scientists that for true progress to occur, humanity must shed its other differences and join hands as one single entity. While that doesn’t seem likely to happen anytime in the near future, it pays to be optimistic when you realise that it might be the best course of action.
For a game that’s almost 20 years old now, Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri still holds up today and is a very insightful and inspiring work of media that fuels thought and takes your mind places. When it feels like our world is on the cusp of a new era every single day because of where our technology has taken us, it’s a nice reminder that we can still mould our destinies as we see fit, and reach out to the stars.
