Elliott Hall

Damn the X-ray lasers, full speed ahead!

I am working on a series of posts concerning the construction of a fictional spacecraft using just-over-the-horizon technology. When I got to the weapons section, I found myself somewhat sidetracked going into the moral considerations of arming a craft that could very well be the vessel of first-contact between humanity and an alien intelligence. This is that aside.

Why would I want to include weapons on our new spacecraft? After all, who would imagine a need for weapons when there is no known threat out there? Why would you want weapons on a ship that may be making first contact with an alien intelligence? Wouldn’t that be an inadvertent prelude to war?

Maybe, and maybe not. We’re working in a vain attempt to quantify great unknowns. Its been maintained by some cautionary authors of science fiction that any species capable of travelling the gulf between worlds will have long since abandoned warfare and violence. I think this is silly rubbish. Even assuming that whoever we meet out there are enough like us to have similar rationality, we here on Earth, despite knowing better, and in many cases having the means to do better, still have yet to construct an international system where economically-motivated violence is a thing of the past.

The fact remains that while its reasonable that any intelligence encountered out there will be benevolent and friendly, the real likelihood of that is a complete stab-in-the-dark guess. Its easily as likely that we would run into xenophobes, or racists. The universe isn’t Star Trek. I’m not sure if anyone has been paying attention, but egalitarianism doesn’t always prevail. Egalitarian ideas of reason, peace, and democracy, and the advancement of all those created equal is an unstable peak at best above a sea of vicious authoritarian chaos, maintained by tireless fighters who grow fewer in number every day that passes. How can we presume that other intelligence, motivated by the same material considerations as we, wouldn’t have long ago succumbed to the easy path of gross racist totalitarianism? Perhaps the aliens of a far off star system failed in their great war against Fascism, and we will meet a people who exterminated their enemies at home, and are just as willing to do it elsewhere in the universe.

The assumption of people like Arthur C. Clarke and Carl Sagan is that any alien intelligence would need to solve the problems of energy and space to cross the gulf between the stars. If human beings could solve the problems of energy, we would have the ability to turn the earth into a utopian paradise, making war itself a thing of the past. It presumed that these aliens would have found that capability, with indicates science and reason, and that they would actually have done so on their home world, indicating further reason and the existence of egalitarian principles within their culture. Assuming the presence of such reason, then the presence of weapons on our human spacecraft shouldn’t necessarily be interpreted as threatening, only as reasonably cautious. Another point is that if these aliens are so significantly advanced over the humans manning my ship, who is to say they would recognize the weapons at all, or fear them even if they did? Certainly this issue has been dealt with many times in science fiction.

What motivates me to arm this ship, however, is the aspect of an alien intelligence that we can’t know. That they might have motivations towards violence that we cannot imagine. Perhaps something chilling, mercilessly mundane and Lovecraftian, not violence at all in their minds, simply exploiting a newfound resource that has the means to come to them. Perhaps, like David Gerrold’s Chtorrans, our extinction is simply a function of the aliens’ survival, and there is no conscious motivation for conflict to be found. My issue is that so often in popular culture alien intelligence has been depicted as being a reflection of our own, which, literary considerations aside, is one hell of an assumption. It presumes too much, that the chemistry is the same, biological structures are significantly similar, that the planetary conditions are the same, that culture would have evolved along similar lines, that communications would be similar. It assumes an entire history that can be expressed in human terms. What the crew of my spacecraft needs to be prepared for, is the very real chance that there will be no points of reference, and that a first contact may come in the form of an X-ray laser blast, or worse. They need to be able to defend themselves.

If that means cosmic war, then let it come. Suffering is purification, and humanity will be that much stronger for it. If not, then we probably do not deserve to be in this game in the first place. One more struggle for humanity on the road to Calvary. I believe that the universe wants us dead. By wants I don’t mean desires, but that the odds are not in our favor. I believe the odds are stacked horribly against us, and its been nothing but incredible dumb luck that the Human race has not only survived as long as it has, but even managed to evolve in the first place. While its the gambler’s fallacy to say that our streak will run out simply because its gone on since, well, the formation of the moon, our luck can and will run out at some point. It is inevitable that we will move beyond this world, and while the inevitability of moving beyond this Solar System is admittedly less certain, we must do so solemnly nonetheless. I would prefer a future of contact with aliens that more resembled Star Trek rather than the cold and troubling alternative, but if life on Earth is a microcosm of cosmic society, then we should be getting very afraid very soon. Such fear is a warning, one that demands constant and efficient effort towards our own supersurvival.

Shall humanity become the racist stellar empire I mentioned earlier? It depends. It would be an easier policy, but its neither necessary nor prudent in the long term. Peaceful contact with any alien intelligence, even one less technologically advanced than we, would open doors to knowledge and understanding that no one alive can scarcely imagine. To that end we must be deeply aware of the lessons of history, of times when explorers and soldiers made contact with peoples alien to them, and the repercussions of the decisions made. What would seem to be the lesson here, is that for peaceful contact to happen, it will require that human beings behave like human beings, with the lessons of our own evolution in our sometimes powerfully rational consciousness. To make contact peacefully, we must be the peaceful aliens. Nobody ever points out that even though the aliens of Sagan’s or Clarke’s imagination have crossed the gulfs of space, they may very well have toted weapons along, and just never bothered to show them to the monkeys when they finally met them. Monkeys who wouldn’t have recognized the weapons anyway.

Technorati Tags: science fiction, space travel, aliens, morality

Brokeback Mountain

I saw the film monday, and its taken me some considerable time to process. This is not a film that fits easily into one’s accepted modes of reception, and, judging by the completely misplaced reviews, modes of criticism either. The film is magnificent, but for entirely different reasons than other films may be described as such.

I realize now that the feeling of fear that consumed me at the conclusion had occurred throughout the film, especially since Joe Aguirre’s first observation of the Ennis and Jack’s relationship, all the way to Alma Jr.’s arrival in the camaro at Ennis’s trailer. The film wasn’t full of romance, it was full of fear and desolation. I found myself terrified for these men, for Jack and Ennis, for what they had to hide, for what they couldn’t say or do. Even in one of the loneliest places in the world, atop a mountain, they couldn’t even scrawl a hole in the mud and whisper their secrets into it.

I have read a number of complaints, largely by people who either have not seen or refuse to see the film. Before I address any of those, its evident that there are great swaths of people refusing to see the film. I doubt the film would have been as inaccessible as any of them fear.

One criticism I take exception with is that it ‘tears down’ the strong male-male friendship. I cannot fathom how. I have a number of strong male friendships, and in at least two cases, we cannot seem to hang out in this city without being called fags or have every other person insinuate how gay we are. Trust me people, there is no hot gay sex to follow later in the evening, so I am forced to wonder as to who is really doing the tearing down of the strong male friendship. I don’t think its a single scene of homosexual sex in an entire film about a homosexual relationship.

Which leads me to another point, there seems to be the perception that this is a big budget gay porn film. The scenes of heterosexual sex outnumber the scenes of homosexual sex at least four to one, being that, as mentioned above, there is only one homosexual sex scene. All the sex scenes are visceral, and border on violent. This seems to have disturbed many people, so unfortunately it makes me wonder what kind of sex people are having to come to expect that it would be all hugs and kisses and cuddling. Longing, particularly the kind of longing that grew between these men leads to a sexual act that is somewhat removed, almost impersonal, since you wait and want in silence for so very long the cascade of desire leads to something of a regression. If as Roland Barthes held, that the lover’s tragic position is as the one who waits, when the waiting is over, all other social considerations fail. Thus, there is the human being as animal, and the passion has a forcefulness of its own. Ennis takes his wife from behind in their passionate, ’salad-years’ lovemaking, alluding to his first encounter with Jack, whereas later its prim and proper missionary position, devoid of unspoken passion and derailed by the weight of spoken reality.

That there was a constant disconnect between the words spoken in the film and the events depicted visually, that coming to a head where there were flashbacks that I didn’t even notice were flashbacks. The sense of time when Ennis and Jack are together is destroyed, as the environment on high-altitude Brokeback mountain never seems to change seasonally. It snows in August, or is clear in November. This dissolution of time is common throughout, as the story spans twenty years, taking large leaps at a time, emphasizing the longing.

Evan speaks on the subject of language and silence with more eloquence than I could hope to muster:

“Both men deny queerness; neither man has terms for what is happening. We are so, so fortunate, we are perhaps to believe, to have a language now for love, and trust, and intimacy, and sensitivity. But I come out of this film deeply distrusting all that, as there is still not the second part of this story, how we have crossed from the unspoken and unspeakable, into the patches of speech we now inhabit, and what power assigned those terms. But as it is, this film is a knife into the eyes of its viewers and a land mine for our language, which it precedes.”

He goes on to say that perhaps the film was never meant for mainstream audiences, its modes being more a ‘message to “gay men”‘; and I’d have to say, “I don’t know” to that. I don’t think its specifically of that kind of a message, if you replace the cowboys with Chinese Opera Singers you get an interestingly similar film. Its my feeling that this is more of a Chinese film than I think Ang Lee would be willing to admit, and it channels “Farewell My Concubine” in loneliness and “Happy Together” in a number of places, if memory serves, and has the lonely desolation and sense of loss that tend to characterize Chinese cinematic drama.

If this film is for anyone; This is a film for anyone who has waited, in silence, in that desolate place where our passions really live, for a lover that would never return.

Technorati Tags: Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee, Movies, Criticism

A small aside…

I found this to be rather entertaining. I got this link off a Christian blog, and thought I would try my luck, thinking for certain that I would end up discovering my Heresy; my Biblical knowledge being more than a decade old:

Are you a heretic?
created with QuizFarm.com

Except, apparantly, I’m not a Heretic. I find it humorous that someone can come back to Christianity from a long trip through Buddhism and crossing the bridge south of Gnosticism only to discover themselves to be compliant with doctrine.

Technorati Tags: Christianity

12/22/2005: “The inexplicable F-22 debate”

Sometimes, history is not as cyclical as we have been led to believe.

In the 1920s, there was a flurry of Battleship construction under the London and Washington naval treaties. The ships were limited in displacement and guns, but nearly every postwar power felt it needed large Battleships for some inevitable circumstance where all the Navies in the world would slug it out individually. Indeed, many American battleships were designed specifically to engage the Royal Navy, not the Imperial Japanese Navy, or the Kriegsmarine. Most anyone with their head to the ground in that era militarily would have known that the second world war was brewing, certainly by 1933, if not earlier.

American air power advocate Billy Mitchell warned in 1926 specifically of the threat of Japanese Naval Air Power to the United States. The US Navy continued to insist through 1942 and the battle of Midway that Battleships still were the dominant machinery of force projection, despite the fact that American and Japanese superbattleships would never engage each other during the course of the war.

There was a program, the Montana class superbattleships, laid down in 1941 but cancelled and scrapped by 1942, that have been compared, though indirectly, to the just-commissioned F-22 Raptor. The Montanas were very expensive, and in nearly every way, superlative in their class of weapon. The F-22 is similarly expensive, and similarly superlative. The term ‘unnecessary’ has been applied to both weapon systems.

The United States is engaged in the Global War on Terror, an inhereantly non-Clausewitzian and asymmetric conflict. The notion persists that because we have supposedly just entered an era of non-Clausewitzian conflict, that suddenly no future conflict will ever be Clausewitzian again.

In March of 2003, the United States invaded Iraq. While no Iraqi aircraft challenged American air power for the sky, the invasion played out in a decidedly Clausewitzian fashion. Large American armored formations manuvered and engaged in artillery duels with fortified Iraqi forces. American military forces engaged a uniformed, regimented, centralized, Clausiwitzian Iraqi military. If President George W. Bush’s words are to be believed, and Iraq was indeed an objective in the War on Terror, it would seem that the non-Clausewitzian conflict had seen a decidedly Clausewitzian phase. The conflict in Iraq has since settled into the pattern of guerilla partisanism that characterized the war in Vietnam, as well as the lesser known but related Phillippine Insurrection. Related to the Iraq conflict in the sense that it was a war that began in Clausewitzian terms, with the sinking of Spanish warships in Manila bay, and ending in an asymmetrical non-Clausewitzian guerilla war.

During the guerilla phases of both Vietnam and the Phillippine insurrection, the United States continued to pursue and acquire weapons befitting of Clausewitzian conflicts. Dreadnoughts, artillery systems, aircraft carriers, fighters and bombers. While there was certainly congressional objections to each and every one of them, the objections raised were seldom questioning the overall need for the weapon system in the context of future warfighting ability. The most notable comparison remains the Montana class battleships.

The Montanas were outdated due to a fundamental technological shift in warfare. Battleships had become vulnerable and costly, and not able to deliver the projection now offered by their successors: the Aircraft Carrier.

The F-22 has not become vulnerable, and as a function, costly, in the same fashion. They represent enhanced ability, be it Clausewitzian, for warfighting. They are mightily costly, but this is a because of their advanced abilities and investment in technological development than their vulnerabilities the same as outdated battleships.

This comparison of course begs the question - could there have arose a conflict where the Montana battlships might have proven their worth? Its unlikely, because the superbattleships that did see fighting in the second world war - the Yamato, the Musashi, the Tirpitz, and the Bizmarck, were all sunk by air power. In the case of the Tirpitz, without firing a shot. Their time had passed. The fact that all likely combatants possessed capable aircraft meant their time had passed.

Given that the Montanas were designed with fighting the British Royal Navy in mind and not America’s real future enemies, Japan and Germany, dismissing the F-22 as unnessary when pitted against supposedly fictional foes like the PRC or North Korea is somewhat shortsighted. There remains many nations that possess decidedly Clausewitzian military capability, and regrettably, you don’t know which one of them will constitute a future threat. People in the 1920s dismissed a Germany shackled with the treaty of Versailles and a non-threat, but it still took millions of lives to defeat them. Just because the enemies of today choose their weapons from a short list of what a man might carry, does in no way mean the enemies 15 years from now will be similarly constrained.

That the F-22 was in development for over 20 years and at cost is a compelling case that things are not as they once were. To deploy a capable fighting machine, considerable scientific and engineering effort needs to be applied, over greatly extended lenths of time. The days of developing a fighter in the course of six months are left in 1941. The technological change and economic realities preclude it. If the United States finds itself in a conflict in 2022, and possesses only equipment developed in 1976, there will be no time to catch up. We will have lost before the first plane leaves the drawing board.

I’m glad the F-22 finally went into service. Its an exceptional Aircraft, and gives the United States Air Force abilities that it needs for the future.

Technorati Tags: F/A-22 Raptor, Battleships, Military Strategy, Military History, Force Projection, United States Air Force

12/19/2005: “By Zeno!”

“Science, however, cannot create ends and, even less, instill them in human beings; science, at most, can supply the means by which to attain certain ends. But the ends themselves are conceived by personalities with lofty ethical ideals and — if these ends are not stillborn, but vital and vigorous — are adopted and carried forward by those many human beings who, half-unconsciously, determine the slow evolution of society.”

— Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?

Unfortunately for Mr. Einstein, the vigor and vitality of ‘lofty ethical goals’ seems to have waned even further since this essay was penned. Science has long since left the noble realm of serving a greater humanistic good, and has become the tool of capital. And Socialism… has become a very dirty word.

Apparantly the scientist has not only become the producer of means, means generally adapted to further subdivision and alienation acting back on the scientist and on all society, but some perverse mechanism of this production. In the context of my favorite critique, this shouldn’t really come as any surprise. Expectations of the artist are similar, as I would imagine for most any other ‘productive’ endeavour. When an individual fails to fit the spectacular mold of their vocation’s means of spectacular production, retribution is swift and terrible. People lash out quickly at the percieved selfishness, having been alienated sufficiently themselves and unable to find an adequate means to relate. That the producer may dare to keep secret his chymist’s knowledge, real or percieved, from even the most disinterested audience is the worst act they might commit. They are denying the spectators their contribution of spectacle. And the spectators hate this more than any act imaginable.

It a creature that has bared its teeth to me twice now, and I’m certain it won’t be the last time. Perhaps now, given some experience, I can come to some method of coping with or avoiding it.

There was a time when I believed that productiveness was the answer to this social challenge. Its reasonable, after all, that the producer might control the product - and thereby some small part of the mediation that everyone else exists by. This is flawed. The producer is forced by alienation into a specific mode of production. They are not tacitly allowed to deviate from this. It was once postualted that the producer may elevate themselves away from the station of spectator through means of constant criticism. This too has since been subverted, as crticial thought itself has been duplicated and like a poor analog copy diminished in each repetition into meaninglessness.

Perhaps a new stoicism is in order.
Probably the most gallingly “selfish” act of all.

Technorati Tags: Situationism, Criticism, Economics, Society, Socialism, Alienation, Stoicism, Philosophy