Reel Entropy

Images courtesy — oh no, you maniacs, oh god damn it all! Images courtesy Walt Disney Motion Picture Studios.

10/10 In space, no one can hear you scream. No one can hear you do or say anything at all, in fact. That’s because in space, there’s usually no one else there.

In the near future, the United States Space Command has established permanent bases on the moon and Mars, and commercial lunar travel is just another trip to the airport. As technology marches ever further into the heavens even while our ecology continues to collapse around us, humanity has grown desperate in its search for extraterrestrial life –for any shred of evidence to break the Fermi Paradox, proof that we aren’t already doomed, an example of some civilization that has solved our current problems. USSC sends a space station, a highly classified mission called the Lima Project helmed by Cliff McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), into orbit around Neptune, the furthest manned mission in history, to conduct anti-matter experiments that may finally connect us with intelligent life.

I’ve always thought the belief in alien life and the belief in God came from the same human instinct. They manifest very differently in different kinds of people – belief in extraterrestrial life, or even the notion of it, would be explicitly antithetical to early Christian teachings, for an extreme example – but they both stem from the notion that human life being unique, that we might have this entire universe to ourselves, would be too terrifying to bear. The real horror is that, even as we study the stars and ancient texts and send radio waves and prayers into the sky in the hopes that someone, anyone, is listening, we might be completely alone.

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