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Comment by wefarrell | Hacker News Reader

Alien is great because it's realistic expectations about space travel is such a stark contrast to the swashbuckling romanticism of popular space operas like Star Wars and Star Trek.

Space is bleak and enormous. There is no technology that will shrink it which means travel will take decades at a minimum and the most palatable way for humans to travel in that environment is in some kind of stasis. And it's going to require massive space ships that are going to be funded by huge multinational corporations. They will enforce their will through AI that have absolutely no empathy for the humans on board.

Depressing, but I think it's the most realistic portrayal of space travel in sci fi and the amazing art design reinforces that feeling of bleakness throughout the film.

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> And it's going to require massive space ships that are going to be funded by huge multinational corporations.

Everything up to here is fine. But this one (and consequently the next), why do you think that?

Why would corporations finance interstellar travel anyway? There's no profit in that.

(Personally, I still think the most palatable way to travel in that environment is to make your ship so damn good that you don't even care if it's getting anywhere.)

You mean aside from exploration with the idea of discovering something new that can be turned into a profit?

Shipping.

That's exactly what the Nostromo was: a shipping container. They were hauling goods from one planet to another for some (profitable) reason.

What we know now, however, is that a great deal of that could likely be automated / not require a crew. But even then: the Nostromo was massive with what could amount to a skeleton crew (half a dozen?). Container ships even today have more than that on them.

Of course with the synthetics (or "artificial persons" as the more sympathetic Bishop from the sequel preferred to be called) what counts as "automation" in the Alien universe?

> Why would corporations finance interstellar travel anyway? There's no profit in that.

If they won't, then nobody will. The most you'll get is a few state-prestige projects which fly around a tiny handful of people at most before they get bored and move on. This is probably the most realistic outcome but it doesn't make for much of a sci-fi story so it's better to take some liberties and assume that commercial exploitation of space flight might somehow be possible. Once you've accepted the possibility of space commerce for the sake of the story, you can pull publicly funded space travel into your story as well if you wish.

You could also use war as a justification, but the viability of the sort of interstellar war that involves spaceships of people flying around (rather than the use of long-range weapons of mass extermination) likely suggests the viability of interstellar trade or at least resource exploitation.

The real answer to the Fermi paradox. No intelligent species has yet figured out a way to commercialize interstellar travel.

>If they won't, then nobody will.

Churches? To spread the good news to alien worlds?

> Why would corporations finance interstellar travel anyway? There's no profit in that.

Resources? Should we find planets with lots of them but a surrounding environment that is hostile to human life, there would be enough demand for mining and automated manufacturing with cargo ships going back and forth. The industry would likely love being permitted to pollute those planets at will since there would be no biosphere that could be harmed.

Well I do not know if it's going to be profitable but at least the foundation of interstellar trades have already been studied: there's a published paper on it by Krugman (https://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf)

Even in the future we have weak unions and crappy workplace safety enforcement.

Alien lifeform - Check Dangerous - Check Ability to eat through spacesuit dome - Check

Sorry dude, we going to need to quarantine your ass.

Instead, all but one of the crew gets killed, the entire shipment is lost, and the spaceship itself is destroyed.

> Instead, all but one of the crew gets killed, the entire shipment is lost, and the spaceship itself is destroyed.

They don't have insurance in the future?

yes but they also have Carter J. Burke's

"You know, Burke, I don't know which species is worse. You don't see them f^*!ing each other over for a goddamn percentage."

> Carter J. Burke's

Amazing that 'Bullshit Jobs' still exist in the future

https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Jobs-Theory-David-Graeber/dp...

No need to be so bleak. Your post makes for good scifi but if you look at spaceflight today it's largest proponent is a benevolent individual that exudes empathy, not a soulless company. He is competing with another extremely empathic and very human individual whose company goes to great care in making sure it's software is hyper aware of individuals at his distribution warehouses demonstrating he too cares about the individual. In Alien the AI (or in the case of Alien Ash the android) ultimately fails the crew because it had secret programming to force it to take action based on hidden motivations, but we would never force AI to have guard rails or generate results based on secret/agenda driven requirements in it's programming. We've known since 2001 A Space Odyssey not to do that and it's a very recurring theme we have thought about and is like the one basic agreement we should never do with AI. Maybe in 2000 years we'll forget and do something crazy with AI but for now we are good.

Spaceflight is in good compassionate hands. AI is in good hands and will never be told to lie/manipulate. Gene editing is not another genie being let out of the bottle. Alien really doesn't have a message relevant to today's realities.

This a great news! I always suspected all was well with the world.

I still think that if they commanded the energy to move a massive interstellar freighter, they could have afforded to run a few more light bulbs in the corridors.

I first saw this movie in the late 80's soon after my roommate and I had just graduated from nautical school. Everything about Nostromo, down to the personalities of the crew, reminded us of an oceangoing ship. Ridley Scott got the atmosphere perfect.

I've spent some time as a civie on a Royal Navy warship. If anything, that was more cluttered than Nostromo (every bulkhead seemed covered with stuff). But it was a lot brighter!

A horror film is supposed to be dark. Otherwise you'll see the horror is just a guy in a rubber suit.

By removing every third light bulb they saved anywhere from $40000 to $500000!

Yeah, only ST:TNG really got that right.

And hire a plumber.

Is it realistic to expend what should be a tremendous amount of energy to put a massive cargo space vessel in (presumably) an orbit around a planet? And then expend energy again to escape and head back? Memory fades, so most likely better explanation.

Maybe we just wrap planet Earth in more tech so that it becomes a ship and we can steer the entire planet, maintaining a climate with tech. Risky, but once we have more planets settled we will be able to experiment with this.

Liu Cixin - Wandering Earth

...Is a book I have not read, but the author is also the author of my favorite non-parody Scifi series (Remebrance of the Earths Past / Three Body Problem).

There's no reason to have humans involved at all. The natural explorers of space are robots. For decades they have done all the real science in space anyway.

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