The Xenomorph and our Tech Overlords
Immortality, from Gilgamesh to Kurzweil
My expectations were dialed in perfectly for Alien: Earth. Disney acquired the Alien IP in 2019 as part of the 20th Century Fox catalog, and a piece of intellectual property as recognizable as the xenomorph cannot be left to abide in dignified peace. The logic of the entertainment industry demands that it be exhumed and milked on an ongoing basis.
Understanding this, I expected Alien: Earth to play out as yet another memberberry cash grab with recognizable surface detail plastered over a pro forma plot; basically Alien: Romulus stretched over 8 episodes of prestige TV. I never watched the Fargo TV series, Legion, Lucy in the Sky, or My Generation, so, going in, I had no particular associations with showrunner Noah Haley. Now I do.
I plan to keep watching, but, in terms of timing, I’m in an awkward position for reviewing individual episodes in this newsletter. I publish new essays to my Gen X Science Fiction & Futurism Substack account on Tuesdays. I almost always write them that same day. New episodes of Alien: Earth premier at 8 pm on Tuesday evenings, just a few hours after I publish this newsletter. In terms of contributing to the community consensus on each new installment, my publication schedule means I couldn’t be any later to the party.
So, I won’t bother. Other reviewers have done a fine job, and I mostly agree with the consensus; the premier episode, which faithfully recreates the original setting, was engrossing. It felt like an expansion of the universe of Ridley Scott’s 1979 original rather than a revisionist take or soft reboot. The cast was excellent, and the writing wove character motivations into a convincing dynamic that drove the plot. Good stuff.
The second episode took a big step down in terms of narrative cohesion and plausibility. The plot required characters to make credulity-straining decisions, and the xenomorph was in mass murder mode instead of pursuing its far creepier agenda of parasitic reproduction via living hosts. Having a whole squad of children in synthetic super-soldier bodies threatened to grate on my nerves if their ranks are not thinned in coming episodes.
All that said, the second episode still exceeded my initial expectations for the series, so I’m still onboard. And I plan to articulate and share my thoughts. That’s what I do.
If I’m not going to review it episode by episode, what’s left to write about? The answer is right up there in the title; the elite pursuit of immortality. The restart of the Alien franchise is thematically relevant to today’s lived experience because our oligarchs, just like the ones in the Alien franchise, are determined to use their titanic fortunes to cheat death heedless of the chaos and gross collateral damage they’ll wreak in the process.
The events of Alien: Earth take place just prior to the events of the original film, which is to say about thirty years after the events of Prometheus. Here’s a brief timeline:
Prometheus (2093)
Peter Weyland, god complex gazillionaire, bankrolls an expedition to LV-223 in search of immortality. For his trouble, he gets clubbed to death with the head of his synthetic son, David.Alien: Covenant (2104)
A colony ship, waylaid by a John Denver song, diverts to a planet that seems like an even better candidate for colonization than their intended destination. They encounter David, the synthetic villain from the previous film. Hilarity ensues.Alien: Earth (2122)
Set about 30 years after Prometheus and about 20 years after Covenant. We’re only two episodes into a 8-episode run, but we already know that Weyland’s obsession with immortality was more than just a private fixation. His peers are also in pursuit of eternal life. Corporate oligarchs in the setting of the show are focused on three methods of foiling the limited shelf life of human biology; cyborgs, synthetics and hybrids.Alien (the original film, 2122–2124 depending on which canon source you go by)
A crew of space truckers on their way back to Earth are redirected to investigate an unidentified transmission. As it turns out, their cargo run was a false front. Investigating the derelict alien ship was the actual purpose of their mission from the start. Ash, the undercover synthetic, was tasked with returning a specimen to Earth. Crew: expendable.Alien: Romulus (2142):
Weyland-Yutani researchers study the recovered xenomorph from the wreckage of the Nostromo along with an urn of the Engineers’ black bioweapon goo. Shit goes sideways and sets up a haunted house into which a group of spunky but none-too-brite young folk stumble. Nonsensical callbacks and a psychedelic remix of previous films ensue.Aliens (2179):
Ripley, the lone survivor of the Nostromo, wakes up after nearly 60 years in cryosleep and accompanies a group of marines back to the planet where she and her crew first encountered the alien species. Performative concern for the lives of missing colonists masks the ongoing corporate agenda to acquire a living xenomorph specimen. While a bunch of fun, the world-building seems disconnected from the original film, and each movie thereafter bore a more tenuous stylistic connection to Alien.
Aliens marks a transition from the coherent timeline detailed above into the scattershot nonsense of Alien3 and Alien: Resurrection. After those two incongruent entries, the series lay fallow until Ridley Scott returned to the Alien universe to flesh out the early timeline with Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. His late career entries into the series, while silly, did shift the focus from nebulous corporate greed–the Company wanted the alien for their bioweapons division–to the elite quest for immortality.
I like the shift from garden variety greed as the driver of corporate recklessness to a hunger for immortality. Historically speaking, the corporation in its contemporary form is a recent phenomenon. The desire to evade death is as old as writing and probably much older. It’s a more primal motivation and closer to our hearts than just making more money.
No matter how much wealth and power the most successful men amass, they are never satisfied. They suffer from an itch they can never scratch with money. The more they acquire, the more they seem to devote themselves to further acquisition. Try as they might to quell their mortal anxiety with more money, territory, or notoriety, acquisition can never bring lasting satisfaction. William S. Burroughs explains, “Who wants to be the richest guy in some cemetery?”
Sure, you can hand off your empire to your heir, but he didn’t build it. You did. He might say the right things about how he intends to manage it and carry on your legacy, but you know that he’s a spoiled rich brat who never worked a day in his life. He never faced the sort of adversity that shaped you into the embodiment of drive and determination that you are. The best you can expect from your descendants is competent stewardship for a generation or two, but without you around to carry on the project, everything you built will crumble into dust.
“Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Stoics might say that coming to terms with this realization is the foundation of wisdom, but fuck that. Better to do the impossible than make peace with the inevitable.
Among the oldest literary works in existence is the Epic of Gilgamesh. It’s over 4,000 years old, and it’s the story of a heroic king who conquers all challenges with his besty, Enkidu. After the gods arrange for Enkidu’s death, Gilgamesh determines to find the key to eternal life. In the end, Gilgamesh learns that death is inevitable.
Plan B: If you can’t live forever, then take as much with you as you can. Go to your grave with all the wealth, servants and trappings of greatness you’ll need to ensure your kingly status in the afterlife. The great pyramids and other archeological sites have certainly preserved a lot of information about the cultures that created them, but while today’s heads of state profess religious faith for public image purposes, they surely suspect that lavish tombs and coteries of murdered servants buried with you don’t change the fact that dead is dead. Or to quote Peter Wayland, “There’s nothing.”
If you can’t take it with you because you don’t go anywhere when you stop breathing, then you either need to make peace with death or it’s back to Plan A. Don’t die. And today’s tech lords seem fully committed to the belief that accelerating technological advances are bringing Plan A within reach. Some of them demure on the topic in public, but the dominant religion among the tech elite is materialist immortalism.
Ray Kurzweil’s official job title at Google may be Director of Engineering, but that’s a smoke screen. He’s the high priest, articulator of the Singularitarian faith and keeper of the immortalist flame.
I listened to a recent interview with him this morning, and he seems rock solid in his confidence that AGI happens in 2029. By the 2030s, we’ll have nanobots in our bloodstreams and brains, extending human cognition into the Cloud, and immortality awaits anyone who manages to hang in long enough to cross the Singularity finish line in 2045. His confidence rests on a career’s worth of predictions about technological progress that have come true. That’s how he sees it, anyway.
Even in the 1990s, talk of immortality wasn’t fringe. At the Eighth Millennium Evening event at the White House, President Clinton, in his role as a booster for the Human Genome Project, said, “We want to live forever, and we’re getting there.”
When I first encountered this vision of the future in the 1990s, nanotechnology was a key component. But the longer nanotech failed to take shape, the more the Singularitarians and other would-be immortals stopped including it in their visions of how we’ll first conquer death and then conquer the stars. Not Ray Kurzweil. He refuses to compromise the vision.
Quoth Ice-T:
“I can't put any cut on the product
I just can't live like that”
I’m not here to mock Ray’s vision or assert that the lords of tech are delusional in their ambitions. I inhabited their worldview full time for years, and I still make the occasional return visit. Even though I don’t have health insurance and haven’t been to a dentist in the last five years, I harbor fantasies of a total medical makeover. I imagine getting dental implants to restore my smile, new lenses in my eyes, stem cell injections in my knees, surgical lifts and tucks to nix the creeping man boobs, and either TRT or some other endocrine boost to re-activate my fading libido. New adventures await. Distant horizons beckon.
When Ray Kurzweil talks about immortality for everyone who manages to drag their sorry asses across the finish line in 2045, I can’t help but do the math. I’ll be 77. That seems doable.
I wrote last week about my intuitive expectation for the near future. I was careful to say that it’s not a forecast, as it runs on vibes, not data. But I expect increasing turmoil, class warfare, exacerbating wealth inequality, geopolitical conflict and rampant mental derangement and emotional dysregulation for the remainder of the 2020s. On my intuitive timeline, things start to turn around in the early 2030s, and by the middle of the next decade, everyone will agree that the worst is behind us and that we’re on track for a new civilizational high.
The Fourth Turning will give way to a new flourishing, and robotic outposts on the moon, Mars and the asteroids will shift into high gear with in situ resource utilization. Exploration will progress to development. The robots will pave the way for human settlement, and Elon Musk’s ambition of turning humanity into a multiplanetary species will lose its maniacal sheen.
Or some idiot could start a nuclear war tomorrow.
Back to Alien: Earth and immortality. I like the fact that the quest for immortality is now front and center. I get the impression that this Noah Hawley guy knows a thing or two about making good TV, and I’m hoping that episode two represents a temporary wobble rather than presaging narrative collapse, but regardless of where the Alien franchise goes from here, Mr. Hawley has done it a solid. If corporate logic refuses to let the franchise rest, the quest for immortality is a more meaningful thematic frame than boring old corporate greed. Not that greed isn’t a real force shaping our world, but bemoaning it is about as useful and interesting to me as calling everyone a racist.
One more quote.
“If mere preaching of virtue could provide the answer, then we would have arrived at the threshold of angelic existence some time ago. If mere legislation of virtue were an answer, we would have learned a long time ago.”
-Terence Mckenna
Neither virtue nor law will dissuade our tech overlords from their fixation. They’re happy to mouth whatever virtuous platitudes are fashionable while adhering to their sacred ambition, and their power rivals that of government. What’s more, I don’t want them to fail. I don’t necessarily want to live forever, but I’d like a second crack at the vitality of youth.
It’s now after 7 pm. Aliens: Earth starts in less than an hour, and I’m dirty and wet from helping my mother retrieve her wayward cattle in a rainstorm. Time to get this posted and get in the shower.
I’ve got a new short video project called Dreamed in Latent Space. Available on multiple platforms. You could do me a solid by watching a one-minute installment all the way to the end and giving it a like. You can find it on:
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@latent.space.drea
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