Why so glum?

There was a time when the future seemed so bright you needed to wear shades, but such is not the case anymore.  Either we have lost our innocence or we just love to wallow in our own misery.  The future is now primarily seen as a post-apocalyptic nightmare that we have to scratch and claw for survival, often with little hope that things will get better.

For some the only way out is to leave this planet all together and start a new life on Mars or somewhere else within our yet to be determined cosmic reach.  Not that we are designed for space travel.  Human beings have never spent more than 437 days in space.  Our bodies have a hard time handling weightlessness, not to mention the amount of water and nutrients necessary to sustain life in transit or on some inhospitable planet.  Science fiction has given any number of possibilities for extended space travel, principally suspended animation, but I would think the only way to transport human life from one planet to another would be as eggs and sperms and then have androids bring humans to life via in vitro fertilization.  The same could be said for any life form.

But, what happens back here on earth?  This would obviously be a folly of the rich.  The vast majority of us would be left to deal with a zombie apocalypse or some other Armageddon nightmare.

I suppose at some point, civilization would win out again.  We can look back at our chart of human history and see that we went through one apocalypse after another and managed to survive.  Whether it was an ice age, famine, disease or war, enough persons were left to carry on the legacy of human kind.  However, many of the contemporary Armageddon scenarios involve aliens arriving from other planets to colonize earth, reshaping it to suit their specific needs, and in the process obliterating human life as we know it.

Such is the case with A Quiet Place.  I'm not sure what type of creatures these are.  They look like something left over from Stranger Things, but move around at startling speed and tear anything apart, including passenger trains to feed off human flesh.  They can't see or apparently smell, so they rely on sound to track their hapless victims.  It's pure nonsense but for whatever reason taken very seriously.  Sadly, John Krasinski didn't survive the first installment, so Cillian Murphy fills his place in the second installment.  The way the movies are structured it might as well be a television serial, as the story appears to go on indefinitely like The Walking Dead.  At least you get the sense they are beginning to figure out ways to elude these mysterious creatures.

This is a thread that runs throughout science fiction.  In H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds, first published in 1898, the alien creatures eventually were unable to survive on earth but not after bringing enormous chaos and ruin.  There have been many interpretations of this classic story.  The most recent places the invasion in the present in French and English to reach a broader audience.  The creatures appear to be robotic with AI and are very deadly.  they seem to be foot soldiers designed to wipe out human kind with some other type of creature to come later.  I didn't have the patience to sit through the whole series to find out.

This contrasts sharply with Edward Bellamy's utopian vision of the future, Looking Backward, in which by year 2000 we had eradicated world hunger and lived in a socialist wonderland.  He used this vision to contrast with the capitalist nightmare of 1887, the year he wrote the book.  The space race of the 1960s also inspired utopian visions of the future like Star Trek in which the world had somehow magically come together in the name of sending intergalactic missions "where no man had gone before."  However, Gene Rodenberry used this premise to play out some of our shortcomings on other planets.

For the most part, we have a rather negative view of the future despite the enormous progress we have made in the last two centuries.  We may not be at peace with ourselves but our society for the most part has found ways to come together even in the most trying times.  So, why all this negativism?

I suppose in part it is because we like scary stories.  Most of these science fiction movies could easily be lumped into the horror genre.  A classic example is Alien, in which a cargo ship is mysteriously led toward a planet that reveals a very dangerous alien life form.  What follows is a claustrophobic horror story set inside a space ship that keeps the viewer on the edge of his or her seat throughout.  However, the film also hints at corporate greed being the ultimate cause of our ruin, which would be developed in the franchise that followed.  Ridley Scott himself revisited the theme in Prometheus.  He also added a strong religious subtheme that more than hinted at the 1968 bestseller, Chariots of the Gods?

Apocalypse stories exist in virtually all religions.  However, there is usually a positive side to this in that a better world is formed out of the ruins of the old.  Certainly, we can see this in succeeding civilizations.  The ultimate aim is to achieve some sort of godhead where we reach full enlightenment and look back at our vainglorious past in wonder of our many shortcomings.  But, this epiphany rarely occurs in today's apocalyptic visions.  We are a doomed society, destined to either destroy ourselves or be eliminated by superior alien creatures.

Even when given a humorous book like Roadside Picnic by the Stugatsky Brothers, Tarkovsky turns it into an existential nightmare.  The book proposed the idea that aliens had indeed visited earth but were just stopping by on their way to somewhere else.  They left a few things behind that intrigued authorities, not just in the Soviet Union but at various spots around the world.  The playful banter reminded me a lot of Kurt Vonnegut.  However, Tarkovsky wasn't content with this light treatment, and shaped it into a dark, turgid tale, dubbed Stalker, in reference to those who would sneak visitors past authorities, which became a cult classic.  I would have loved to see what Mel Brooks would have done with a story like this.

Alas, a deep cynicism pervades our society.  Many of us see a world coming undone as climate change takes its toll, war spills over into Europe and world hunger reaches alarming proportions.  Despite the attempts to address environmental damage and reduce tensions, most persons seem to view these efforts as a lost cause.  We're doomed! 

Even if climate change is as severe as scientists predict, it won't be the end of the world.  There will certainly be a great deal of chaos as coastal cities are flooded and super volcanoes fill the air with toxic ash but there will be pockets of relative tranquility where the human race can survive.  Certainly the prospect of dealing with such potential cataclysms is far less daunting than colonizing Mars!  Even in its worst state, our planet is far more habitable than that distant red planet, which hasn't had running water in more than 3 billion years!

My view is that every little bit helps, if for no other reason than stalling the inevitable for as many generations as possible.