I sat through Jennifer Lopez’s new Netflix movie Atlas the other night. Atlas is what I call generic low-IQ science fiction. It sports many sci-fi elements: evil AIs, good AIs, warm heroines (Jennifer is way too old to be considered hot), robots, spaceships, space marines, explosions, and ridiculous apocalyptic plot lines. Atlas has been thoroughly roasted online. Many are calling it a woke disaster. I’m not one of those people. Yes, Atlas is silly, cartoonish, ill-conceived, lazy, and unimaginative, but if you look around, you’ll see that’s typical for phone-it-in sci-fi movies. For every Arrival or 2001, there are scores of braindead unobtanium promethean abominations. I had low expectations when I pushed Atlas’s play button, and things were unfolding pretty much as anticipated, i.e., I was pleasantly pissing away two hours watching CGI robots bash each other to smithereens until my stupefied brain registered an unfortunate throwaway sentence. This sentence wrecked the already marginal Atlas experience and forced me to write this rant.
What set me off?
I’m not issuing spoiler alerts. Low-IQ sci-fi does not merit it. When Atlas’s evil AI flees Earth, vowing to return for revenge, middle-aged and plump-butted Jennifer Lopez (Atlas Shepard) is tasked with interrogating (torturing actually) one of his AI accomplices to find the big bad guy. She quickly finds him in the Andromeda Galaxy. My inner amateur astronomer bullshit alarm went off.
So, in this sci-fi universe, we not only have interstellar travel, but we also have intergalactic travel. In case you’re keeping score, sci-fi intergalactic travel is rare. It’s not in the original Dune, Star Trek, Star Wars, or Foundation universes. And the reasons for this are clear; Douglas Adams said it best:
Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.
A single garden-variety galaxy like our Milky Way harbors hundreds of billions of stars: plenty of stages for sci-fi plots. When you start popping from galaxy to galaxy, your stage count blows up to ten sextillion.1 That’s 1022 for exponent lovers. This is ridiculously vast. Even Steven King, cranking out one potboiler after another for the next million years, couldn’t fill our actual universe with stories.
You might interject, “Well, John, what’s it to you? Why do you care?”
I care because I like some coherence in my plots.
When the genius-level evil AI flees Earth for Andromeda, you must ask why he would ever return. If you can fly from galaxy to galaxy, why stop at Andromeda? Keep going, you dumb fuck; you have trillions of galaxies to hide in. Even plump-butted Jennifer Lopez can’t search the entire universe. Why come back? The evil AI tells us he must return and purge humanity because we are self-destructive creatures that will destroy ourselves and everything we touch. OK, I respect that argument. We are destructive little shits, and we probably will destroy ourselves, but get a grip. We are not going to take down the entire universe.2 Even if all our interstellar dreams come true and we spread throughout the galaxy and fuck over millions of star systems, the greater cosmos still won’t notice. Trashing the universe will always be beyond the powers of naked apes.
Why doesn’t the genius Atlas evil AI find a galaxy far, far away and wait until we destroy ourselves? He’s immortal; there’s no hurry. So it takes a few millennia for humans to self-destruct: big freaking deal. Why take the risk of seeking redundant revenge? This doesn’t seem like genius-level AI thinking to me. I don’t know why the retarded Atlas screenwriters dragged the Andromeda Galaxy into their hot mess. They probably wanted to plant an allusion; it makes people think they’re clever when they catch allusions, but whatever the reason, the Atlas screenwriters have an acute case of Tiny Universe Syndrome.
Tiny Universe Syndrome is the tendency to project our tiny, overcrowded world onto the universe. It’s a complete scale and imagination failure and betrays the astronomical ignorance of its hosts. Tiny Universe Syndrome is harmless in sci-fi potboilers, but unfortunately, it shows up in reality. If you’ve ever read histrionic screeds about space pollution, China taking control of the moon, or snowflakes triggered by the idea of colonizing other planets, then you’ve encountered Tiny Universe Syndrome. Recently, I had an online spat about PPR rocket exhaust. PPR is a refinement of the old Orion nuclear propulsion idea. Instead of detonating biggly atomic bombs to propel your spacecraft, detonate smallish bomblets instead. PPR pollutes the interplanetary medium with energetic ions, and the dolt I was quarreling with thought this was a serious problem in immediate need of UN regulation. I calmly pointed out that even if billions of PPR spacecraft were blasting ions into the interplanetary medium, it would be insignificant compared to the solar wind. Also, the solar wind works like a giant natural waste disposal system that blows ions into galactic space. This didn’t matter to my opponent; he was driven by envy, not physics. You see, only a privileged few might ride on PPR rockets. This is intolerable. It’s better if we all remain equitably trapped on Earth, policing our microaggressions and misgenderings until we go extinct. Given such a grim future, an evil AI genocide is a mercy killing.
I would strongly advise learning large number words. With runaway inflation, you will need them long before global warming bakes our naked ape asses.↩︎
I am assuming the vacuum is stable.↩︎
Analyze the Data not the Drivel 