It’s the Only Planet We’ve Got

JIMMY BRYAN

In my science fiction class, I tell my students that we can learn a lot by studying how people in the past have envisioned their future. Among other things, we talk about how in the last 40 years a subgenre of science fiction has emerged that tackles environmental issues. Some fans call it “climate fiction” or “cli fi.” There are several examples that we can point to, but I will only mention a few here.

You might remember the old Cold War movie “The Day the Earth Stood Still” (1951). This movie was preoccupied with Cold War anxieties and especially nuclear war. It appeared only a few years after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” an alien arrives on the Earth to intervene in our petty conflicts. To protect the galaxy from our destructiveness, they give humanity an ultimatum— stop your descent toward nuclear war, or we will destroy you. In this case, the alien attempts to save humanity from itself.

In 2008, Hollywood remade and updated the film. In the newer version, the alien arrives on Earth with a message, but this time, he is not concerned with saving humanity from itself. He wants to save the Earth from humanity. He explains that inhabitable planets like the Earth are so rare and precious that our alien neighbors will not let us destroy this one.

One of the most obvious examples of cli fi is “Avatar” (2009). In this film, humans from Earth have exported their capitalism to the galaxy. On the moon Pandora where wondrous alien life flourishes, the company strip mines for the precious mineral called “unobtainium.” Pandora’s native inhabitants— the Na’vi—fight back. The symbolism is not subtle, and “Avatar” is very much a cli-fi film. The surge in films and novels produced in this genre in the last 20 years demonstrates a growing anxiety about our environmental future.

Of course, not all science fiction is climate fiction, but even when the environment is not central to the story, it often serves as a crucial backdrop. For example, in a trope that I call “the doomed Earth scenario,” humanity has already devastated the Earth. Now, they must go somewhere else. The movie “Interstellar” (2014) uses this premise, and it is a good illustration of the trope’s fallacy. In this story, the Earth faces an unspecific human-created calamity. It verges on the brink of being unable to sustain human life. To save humanity, scientists develop interstellar travel so that the Earth’s refugees may travel to and colonize another world.

The screenwriters do not identify what calamity the Earth faces. They do not reveal the cause because they understand the illogic of their story— that if scientists have the capability to develop interstellar travel, then they should have the technology to heal the planet. The screenwriters could not imagine a calamity so complex that it would stymie a society capable of faster-than-light travel. It would undermine their entire story.

Science fiction is an old and popular genre, and the dream of interstellar travel has permeated our culture. It seems to have created a kind of subconscious confidence in a future safety net—a confidence that when the Earth fails, we might travel to other worlds within our reach. But this is a fantasy. Humans will likely never develop interstellar travel. We will not be able to travel to another planet outside our solar system. Scientists have already identified many Earthlike exoplanets, but we will never be able to travel to them—not within our lifetimes—not within our great-greatgreat-grandchildren’s lifetimes. But within our lifetime, we may well see irreversible damage to our planet’s ability to sustain our quality of life—a quality, we have learned today, not equally accessible to all. Furthermore, Earthlike planets likely serve as home to their own lifeforms who may not welcome our future refugees.

Terraforming is another fallacious trope in the science fiction genre. Terraforming represents the future technology of remaking the moon, Mars, or another rock in the galaxy in the image of the Earth—to make them inhabitable for humans. But like interstellar travel, if humans know how to transform an entire planet to look like the Earth, they should know how to repair whatever ails the Earth.

This is my point with this brief look at science fiction film: we know what our environmental problems are. We know how to solve them, and we can also look to history to see that we have done this before.