this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2024
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There's this impulse among many contemporary fiction writers to imply there's a "dead" universe out there, and to me it's both lazy (they don't have to think of convincing or at least fun aliens) and it panders to colonial mindsets about everything out there just being resource nodes to tap while Hans Zimmer BWAAAAAAAAAAMS are going off.
So fuck that. I prefer aliens in my fiction. Learn to share, or at least to behave, o whiteys on the moon.
they could at least give us some spooky space ruins to wax existential about
The Aliens franchise did that, but then it got lazy and made the universe tiny and had Original Synthetic Do Not Steal be responsible for annihilating the Engineers and making the Xenomorphs.
I am less inclined to the believe the universe is "dead" and more inclined to believe it is "vast" and "inhospitable to human life". Voyager 2 took 50 years to exit the Solar System and won't get anywhere near another one before it is out of range of our instruments. We don't have anything remotely fast enough to transit between planets reliably, much less solar systems. And even if we did, the rate of communication would make any kind of human interaction sporadic at best.
So expecting to stumble on alien life any time soon feels overly ambitious. For the time being, we are alone and we have exactly one big rock where we have any chance of survival. Any exploration of deep space has to be approached with that attitude in mind. We are plunging into the Void, not sailing to a New World.
Space exploration stories in the vein of Firefly and Ad Astra and Red Mars and the early seasons of The Expanse and even shlock like Exo-Squad give us a picture of space where its humans dealing with the consequences of their own history and technology and socio-economic choices. We aren't going to find Techno-Wizards or New Edens or Space Monsters to battle and conquer. At best, we're going to find things we have ourselves created. We're going into space and we're going to evolve what we need to exist in space and then we are going to become aliens unto ourselves.
In the end, assuming we can truly get beyond Earth's embrace, that's what's going to be out there. A million million iterations of us, staring back like faces in a broken mirror.