To the stars

Watching Ad Astra the other night I wondered what's up with science fiction movies these days?  They seem to be on a search for God.  James Gray left no doubt about it but alas he drew a very nihilistic conclusion by film's end.  Not so Ridley Scott, his reboot of the Alien franchise in Prometheus and Covenant made it pretty clear that we owe our origins to giant alabaster men, or "engineers" as he called them, who terraformed planets and left their seeds of humanity throughout the universe.  This owed more to Erich Van Daniken books than it did a reinterpretation of the Bible, but his main character wore a cross so one assumes she had a Christian affinity.  It even led the Catholic World Report to expound on what this theological writer thought was the hidden message in the movie.

I suppose many of us look for some connection between faith and reason, refusing to believe the two are mutually exclusive.  Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, has dived deeply into this subject, firmly believing the two are reconcilable.  It's just a question of how we look at reason. Do we view it empirically like science or do we take a broader view of reason and look at it as a way of coping with the physical world as Williams describes in this segment.  God then becomes something beyond our empirical sense of reason, allowing us to approach him in a whole different way.  Reason is reduced to a coping mechanism.

What made Ad Astra odd is that Major Roy McBride was trying to find God empirically by taking man's attempt to establish communication with extra-terrestrial life to the outer reaches of our solar system in the Lima Project.  He had disappeared for close to 30 years when an unusual series of power surges were found to be emanating from Neptune.  His son is sent on a mission to find his father in a surprisingly short duration of time given the method of space travel. Their last contact was when he was a teenager.  Turns out Roy had been systematically mapping the universe and sadly found there is no God. His son didn't seem at all surprised and calmly urged his father to come home with him.  "Home, this is my home!" Roy shoots back.  For the old man space is the final frontier.

As interesting as this premise might be in a more competent director's hands, it still rings hollow.  We float in an enormous vacuum that is far beyond anyone's sense of the infinite.  While astrophysicists claim to be able to see into the origins of the universe with the Webb telescope, what they are actually seeing are images that have traveled thousands if not millions of light years from their initial source and therefor happened long ago, like a cosmic movie.  Even if these scientists believe the "Big Bang" happened 14 billion years ago, what happened before then?  Or, is our sense of "infinity" merely an illusion?

Time seems to be the problem here.  We our bound to it in ways we don't fully comprehend.  It was Godel who suggested to Einstein that time may be looped, and that what we have is a "rotating universe."  Arthur C. Clarke explored a similar theory in 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was made into the seminal science fiction movie of our era.  Clarke wasn't overly concerned with the concept of God but whether we shared this universe with others or were alone in this vast cosmos.   While we can now see that there are planets in the infinite solar systems and no doubt any number of situations where these planets share a similar relationship to the sun as we do, we have no real way of knowing if there is life on them beyond what information we gain from astronomical spectroscopy.  If there is life, we have no way of knowing if it is more primitive or more advanced than our own but we can draw some conclusions from our own solar system.

For instance, Mars has water but it is locked in ice caps that are estimated to be 3 billion years old.  We don't know yet if there is more water trapped beneath the surface, a theme Frank Herbert explored in his classic science fiction novel Dune, which was finally given a deluxe treatment in Hollywood with the second part due out soon.  Whatever the case, Mars is essentially a dead planet.  Given the global warming occurring on our planet, it is an example of what we will become in the very distant future.  If so, our solar system is contracting.  Whatever life occurred on Mars happened no less than 3 billion years ago and has long since dissolved into the planet's arid surface.  Or, if we are to believe some of the ancient astronaut myths found a way to get to our planet and start life over again.  More abstractly some kind of  cosmic cross-pollination might have occurred.  To go to Mars is to look into our apocalyptic future.  Therefore, it makes more sense to look at Venus as our next frontier, a mostly gaseous planet that is essentially being terraformed right before our eyes, although it probably won't be ready for occupation in another billion years or so.

Astrophysicists are really Astroarcheologists.  They are searching more into our celestial origins than they are any glimpse of the future other than to draw rather dire conclusions from what they find.  Yet, science fiction is all about the future.  We are constantly trying to imagine what we will be like in a hundred, a thousand, a million years from now.  Maybe we are just the same life forms that have been escaping imploding solar systems for millennia, living out our current life on a projectile hurtling through the cosmos, destination unknown, other than we might circle back on ourselves and start this process all over again if we are to accept Godel's theories.