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Dead Alien Worlds

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paigetheoracle

Junior Acolyte
Joined
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In accounts of supposed interactions with alien beings, their planets seem on the whole to be semi-deserted wastelands and our planet viewed as an oasis.

Could this be because the rise of a supposedly civilized form of humanoid being, nearly always leads to the same situation we're facing at the moment - intelligent bipeds wiping out all other life forms in favour of their own? In other words could we always be bad news for the survival of a planet?
 
It is more likely the influence of H.G. Wells and his War of the Worlds story. Mars at the time was thought to be a dried up, desertified but still fairly Earth-like world.

In reality, I doubt that an interstellar civilisation would allow their planet to fall into such disrepair; it is extremely energy-intensive to fly spacecraft between the stars, and fixing their home planet would be a much easier option in most cases.
And of course if a planet with icecaps suffers global warming the water level will rise, rather than fall; however if the planet has no polar ice, increased temperature will evaporate the seas somewhat (but only until the atmosphere is saturated).
 
You could look at it another way. The only reason we meet these aliens in the first place is because their planet is buggered. There could be kerbillions of aliens with nice healthy planets who don't bother visiting because we have nothing to offer them.
 
eburacum said:
In reality, I doubt that an interstellar civilisation would allow their planet to fall into such disrepair; it is extremely energy-intensive to fly spacecraft between the stars, and fixing their home planet would be a much easier option in most cases.
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Ah, but if they were anything like us this wouldn't necessarily be the case. Look at all the (private) money being thrown into "space tourism" at the moment, with Richard Branson et al. Meanwhile no one has a clue what to do about global warming. And war is still the activity that has the most money spent on it. I suppose if the aliens were a peaceful, more intelligent race they might try to save their planet first - alas we don't seem to fit into that mould... :(
 
jefflovestone said:
You could look at it another way. The only reason we meet these aliens in the first place is because their planet is buggered. There could be kerbillions of aliens with nice healthy planets who don't bother visiting because we have nothing to offer them.
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Very intelligent observation as it falls in with what I believe and see on the Earth at this time too - criminal destruction of environment forcing human beings to continually move, to find other resources to live on: Happy (successful) people don't move from their home areas because they have the sense not to foul their own back yards (GW Bush and Iraq being a case in point - a stupid person thinking (?) they know better and messing it up for others; Leave 'well', alone as they say).
 
wouldnt it also be easier to find another planet with no inteligent life to hide from?
as i refuse to beleve that there are so few in our small part of the milkyway let alone the galaxy that will suport life but were none has evolved very far
 
paigetheoracle said:
In accounts of supposed interactions with alien beings, their planets seem on the whole to be semi-deserted wastelands and our planet viewed as an oasis.
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Science fiction films, especially, seem devoid of liveable planets. Flash Gordon's Mongo was pretty much a desert. Altair-IV (FORBIDDEN PLANET) was a desert inhabited by two people and a robot. The alien planet in THIS ISLAND EARTH was so poisoned by (continuing) atomic warfare that it was nearly a cinder. The proto-Egyptian world reached through the STARGATE was yet another desert. The planets visited in STAR TREK and LOST IN SPACE were mostly rocky deserts. Even the STAR WARS films seem remarkably devoid of places to actually live, if we don't count battle cruisers.

It's simply CHEAPER to do it that way - you don't have to mock up cities with parks and palaces and private homes, and you don't have to hire extras to convincingly play the inhabitants.
 
I would like to see an alien home planet depicted in fiction with a plausible ecology, even if it was one devastated by ecological disaster; a hothouse world with high humidity and heat-driven hurricanes, raised sealevels and swamped countryside- something like J.G Ballard's The Drowned World (but Ballard wasn't and isn't an ecologist, so he got quite a lot of that scenario wrong).
 
The only way to create a really convincing extraterrestrial civilization is by producing a heck of a lot of backstory, ninety-nine percent of which will never see the printed page. You have to create natural history, the histories of nations, coinage (for various ages) and so on, and you may have to do this for multiple planets.

Therefore it's a lot easier to simply base your galactic civilizations on the Egyptian, Roman or Napoleonic Empires.

Or yet another Dark Age Europe, with soldiers fighting in armor. The fact that they shoot radium-tipped arrows from repeating crossbows or make occasional references to space travel doesn't change things very much.
 
imho its better not to supply too much detail as,for myself,the mind paints a far better picture

myself ive always prefered the story without too much explanation
etc starwars 4(ok its nights in shining armour at heart)
 
TinFinger said:
imho its better not to supply too much detail as,for myself,the mind paints a far better picture.
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That's why I'm so fond of radio drama. But even radio plays can be sketched too thin.

myself ive always prefered the story without too much explanation
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The point I was attempting to make above is that the author needs to know five to 10 times more (bare minimum!) about her/his fictional world and its cultures than he/she reveals to the reader or else the story is going to sound flat. (And it also permits sequels which are more than mere re-hashes of the first story.)
 
As for the movies and television, most sci-fi stories are shot on sound stages. The only outdoor environment that can be economically (and somewhat realistically) recreated on a sound stage is a sparsely decorated desert. Anything other than that would require location shooting which, of course, means a lot more money. So, going all the way back to Fritz Lang's silent classic, Woman on the Moon, we have been exposed hundreds of times to images of planets that are arid wastelands. This has become ingrained pretty deeply into the popular subconscious so it doesn't surprise me that the dying civilization scenario crops up in the UFO phenomenon - first amongst contactees, then amongst their successors, the abductees.

As for pre-movie authors like Wells, his War of the Worlds is recognized as a thinly disguised commentary on British imperialism of the time. His ideas of what drove Martian conquest pretty much reflect his perception of what drove England to build its global empire.

S
 
subconciously it could also be a picture of our own future state
this is what we expect to find in our own future

scary thought aint it
 
First of all, welcome to the festivities.

But cities CAN be effectively created on sound stages. Look at Fritz Lang's METROPOLIS eighty years ago.

One of my own favorite films, KING'S ROW, created an American small city on a soundstage. So this same sound stage could have been just as easily dressed as a "futuristic" city on an alien planet!
 
paigetheoracle said:
In accounts of supposed interactions with alien beings, their planets seem on the whole to be semi-deserted wastelands and our planet viewed as an oasis.

Could this be because the rise of a supposedly civilized form of humanoid being, nearly always leads to the same situation we're facing at the moment - intelligent bipeds wiping out all other life forms in favour of their own? In other words could we always be bad news for the survival of a planet?
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How about looking at this yet another way. Look at a scenario like Bladerunner where we're the ones leaving the planet and starting again elsewhere.
 
OldTimeRadio said:
First of all, welcome to the festivities.

But cities CAN be effectively created on sound stages. Look at Fritz Lang's METROPOLIS eighty years ago.

One of my own favorite films, KING'S ROW, created an American small city on a soundstage. So this same sound stage could have been just as easily dressed as a "futuristic" city on an alien planet!
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Thank you for the welcome, OTR. You've picked a favorite of mine - Metropolis is certainly one of my favorites of all time and proves your point quite well that cities can be done effectively, even without CGI.

Again to your point, Twilight Zone did a great job of making the typical small town seem sinister and somewhat alien. So, perhaps it is not so much the setting as it is the writing and people who bring that writing to life.

Even so, desert-type settings were a favorite, especially during the sci-fi boom of the 1950s. A lot of those films really did have budget constraints so deserts were a cheap environment to recreate. Plus deserts really can be alien and spooky to those of us who grew up amongst grass and trees. Them (1954) uses it very effectively. It was still effective in Tremors (1990).

S
 
But many people are perfactly happy in what we would term hostile enviroments
 
Kondoru said:
But many people are perfactly happy in what we would term hostile enviroments
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I don't think there's any question of that, Kondoru. But that doesn't change the fact that the popular media has repeatedly drawn the connection between deserts and alien environments. After hundreds of repeated exposures, our brains make the subconscious connection too. So you can draw one of two conclusions: that we invent our alien encounters using familiar paradigms OR the aliens tell us what they think we expect to hear.

It's a very Keelian idea but, if you are going to accept accounts of human/alien interaction, you have got to accept that the entities are inveterate liars. After 60 years, we still haven't got a clue as to what their true agenda is.

S
 
Kondoru said:
But many people are perfactly happy in what we would term hostile enviroments
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Some actually prefer it. But surely the majority see a hostile environment and almost immediately want to "terraform" it.

Look at the larger cities of the American Midwest, which went from little collections of log cabins to great metropoli in less than 20 years.
 
Abductees are often shown images of derelict desert planets, but most of them seem to assume that this shows Earth's future rather than the aliens' home world.

As far as people claiming to have actually visited alien planets, I don't think there are that many accounts to choose from once you take the Contactees out of the equation.

Betty Andreasson seems to have visited quite a lush planet, Carl Higdon didn't really get much of a look at the planet he was taken to, and I can't think of any other cases offhand. If you could link to some specific accounts, that would be interesting.
 
How about 'Itibi Ra', probably my favourite contactee planet. IIRC, it was rather a lush jungle planet, where the people engaged in mega games of football in lieu of war. They had an insatiable appetite for new kinds of fruit, which was how they ended up on earth - they had to travel the universe to get new tastes.
 
Graylien, you bring up an interesting issue - what IS the dividing line between contactees and abductees?

People who wouldn't believe the tales of George Adamski, Truman Bethurum, the Mitchell Sisters, Howard Menger or Buck Nelson under torture intrinsically accepted the accounts of Betty and Barney Hill, Carl Higdon and Betty Andreasson.

I always found that interesting.
 
Science fiction motion pictures wherein fleets of starships race back and forth between Desert World A and Desert World B remind me of those attic model railroad layouts where all that trackage and rolling stock merely connects Big Town (three plastic houses, a drugstore and a church) with Fortean Falls (two plastic houses).
 
Two trillion?

For the first time ever I find myself lusting after all those desert worlds.
 
OldTimeRadio said:
Graylien, you bring up an interesting issue - what IS the dividing line between contactees and abductees?

People who wouldn't believe the tales of George Adamski, Truman Bethurum, the Mitchell Sisters, Howard Menger or Buck Nelson under torture intrinsically accepted the accounts of Betty and Barney Hill, Carl Higdon and Betty Andreasson.

I always found that interesting.
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Well for starters, George Adamski claimed that there were cities and vegetation on the far side of the moon and that Venus was inhabited by Nordics. Unless NASA have been lying to us all along, these claims have long been disproven.

Howard Menger also visited the Moon and claimed that they grew excellent potatoes there. (Sadly, Neil Armstrong didn't bring any back with him.)

Buck Nelson, if I remember rightly, claimed that he took his dog along with him to visit Mars. On the trip back ,the alien pilot insisted that the dog sit outside on top of the saucer (I guess he didn't like dog-hairs all over his carpets).

And Bethurium claimed that his space people came from a planet "hidden behind the Moon", which simply doesn't make sense.

Of course, you could always take the approach of Tim Good and claim that the Contactees were deceived rather than decievers.

Personally, I don't take "intrinsically accept" any case that involves hypnotic regression, but that's a whole different argument.
 
graylien said:
And Bethurium claimed that his space people came from a planet "hidden behind the Moon", which simply doesn't make sense.
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"Clarion." But a female contacee whose name escapes me claimed that Clarion shared EARTH's orbit and was thus always hidden from us on the other side of the SUN, which at least makes a little more sense. (If I remember correctly the old comic strip TWIN EARTHS used exactly that premise.)

Even at the time Bethurum's story was new I regarded him as the flying saucer fraudster of flying saucer fraudsters. But I've much mellowed since then. I now suspect that that he had some sort of heat-vision in the desert and came into contact with the feminine side of his own personality.

And look at the striking relationship between the names Truman Bethurum and Aura Rhanes - tRUmAN bEtHURUm and especially AURA RHANEs! Aura was born out of the head of Bethurum like Athena out of the head of Zeus.

[And there's Bethurum's truly weird story of how he later spotted "Aura Rhanes" having a soda in a drug store....and she completely ignored him. That seems a very strange thing to add if you're simply trying to concoct a hoax.]

I remember an illustration of the control panel inside the spaceship of Woodrow Derenberger's "Indrid Cold." There was a compass on the panel clearly marked N, E, S, W. What use this was supposed to be in space in anybody's guess.

One of the elements that sets apart later UFO and UFO-related testimonies is how deeply textured they are when compared to, say, Adamski's cardboardish tales.

Take the Philadelphia Experiment legends, for example. One need not believe a word of them, but they are as textured as a great novel.
 
There is a partly stable location in Earth's orbit directly behind the Sun called the Earth/Sun Lagrange3 point.
A planet placed there would remain hidden for a short time; but because the L3 point is only stable for a short while, any planet placed there would pretty soon migrate out of the point and become visible; in a matter of years or decades such a planet would probably end up hitting the Earth.

One theory is that a planet did form in the somewhat more stable L4 point, sixty degrees away from the Sun in the Earth's orbit; but even the L4 point is unstable in the long term, and after a few million years this planet hit the Earth, (maybe four-and-a-half billion years ago) and the resulting Big Splash is what created the Moon.
 
Truman's female alien was the beautiful Aura Rhanes. Man, that's what I liked about contactees - spaces babes! :lol:

S
 
Skeptical01 said:
Truman's female alien was the beautiful Aura Rhanes. Man, that's what I liked about contactees - spaces babes! :lol:
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Contactee's space babes came ten for a dime -
But O! that Aura Rhanes, she spoke in rhyme!
 
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