It Is Useless To Resist Us!

On Prometheus

Actually not just on Prometheus, but on how it ties in with the Alien movies.

I enjoyed Prometheus.  It was an entertaining film.  But it wasn’t what I was expecting – namely a prequel to Alien.  At best it’s the first half of a prequel.  But I’ll get back to that.  First, some comments about standalone flaws of the film:

 

The opening scene and comments made later in the movie suggest these humanoid aliens set the ball rolling to produce human life on Earth, and that they’ve visited Earth many times over the last few thousand years and had contact with primitive humans.

So what about our primate ancestors then? What about the amazing genetic similarity between humans and other mammals?  Did they start all life on Earth instead – in which case their first visit would have been many hundreds of millions of years ago, and in that case why are they themselves so unchanging?  Or are we to suppose that it’s a coincidence that their DNA happened to be nearly identical to that of Earth life in general?  Do we have a Progenitor situation here where most life-bearing worlds were initially seeded by some long-gone civilization?  And why did the alien at the start of the movie have to sacrifice himself to make life happen?  And why by drinking what we’re later told is a bio-weapon?  Couldn’t they just engineer something in a lab and send it to Earth in a missile?

 

So, a pair of archaeologists, Dr. Holloway and Dr. Shaw, who are also lovers, found a series of cave paintings from different cultures and different eras that all feature a tall humanoid figure pointing at a uniquely identifiable constellation.  From this Dr. Shaw (an admitted religious nutter with psychological problems related to her infertility) somehow concluded the tall figures were aliens that created humanity and that they invite us to visit them in this constellation, and she convinced Peter Weyland to fund an expedition to look for the aliens.  He agreed, secretly hoping that she was right and that the aliens would therefore be able to cure him of old age, somehow.  Weyland was also a nutbar; while he quite rightly wanted immortality, he inconsistently called his android “son” unfortunate for possessing it.  This is probably just the same anti-android racism we see in the other movies.

 

Weyland put 17-odd people on this mission aboard a spaceship that took 28 months to reach its destination at the aforementioned constellation.  Given that relativity does’t seem to have a huge impact on travel in this universe, let’s assume ship time is 1:1 with Earth time – this still means these people signed on to a mission that put them at least five years out of touch with friends and family.  Without knowing anything about their crew mates – indeed, in most cases without having met them before the mission.  Without having been given a thorough psych evaluation.  And without even KNOWING WHAT THE DAMN MISSION IS!!  WTF!  Clearly the Weyland Corporation had the dumbest recruiting department in the history of for-profit exploration.

 

Once on the destination planet, identified as LV-223, the ship landed near a line of artificial structures and half the crew entered one to explore.  The geologist released some robot probes that started mapping out the extensive network of corridors inside. The air inside the building was mysteriously breathable, and like a bunch of fools the exploration party all took their helmets off.  Breathable is a long way from safe!  It could be a temporary condition, and there could be pathogens in the air, in the water dripping everywhere or on the surfaces they touched.

 

The android, David, found inscriptions carved in the walls and correctly identified them as controls, using them (with his deductions about the alien language resulting from two years of language training during the journey) to open doors and trigger apparent security system recordings to play back.  The security recordings showed a group of the humanoid aliens running from an apparent immediate threat, into a room that proved to contain a giant head bust, a lot of drums full of the black goo bioweapon, and relief murals on the walls that started dissolving on exposure to the carbon dioxide exhaled by the explorers.  One of the murals clearly depicted a xenomorph queen, though the implication is that the first one is born at the end of the movie.  Why did this room even exist?  The aliens clearly go in for ornamentation, but why put a small collection of bioweapon containers in a room with a giant bust of what could be either a human or an alien head? (Ignoring scale the aliens’ heads look identical to human ones.)

The aliens sealed their containers with something that dissolves on exposure to carbon dioxide, which is a good idea if you want to set a trap for oxygen-breathing carbon-based life forms, buy why did they also make the murals on the walls out of the same stuff?  Did they just have some left over and decided to paint with it out of boredom?

The aliens in the security recording were likely fleeing from one of the tentacle monsters that we see later on.  But why did they then run into a dead-end room full of the same stuff that gave rise to the monster in the first place?  They would have had a better chance going outside and splitting up.

 

The explorers found a 2,000-year-old alien head and stuffed it in a bag for later study – completely ignoring any risk of damaging it or contaminating it in the process.  Grossly incompetent!

The geologist and the biologist got freaked out by the security recording and the bust room, and left the group to return to the ship.  But they got lost along the way and ended up trapped in the alien building when a storm arose outside.  How did they manage that?  It was that same geologist who released the mapping probes, and they all have reliable radio contact with the ship where the results are being collected – plus, entering an alien edifice for the first time would kind of make an impression in your memory.  There’s no way in hell they should have been able to get lost.   Anyway, later on these two (now with helmets back on) encountered a snake-like alien life form, and in a complete reversal of character they tried to pet the damn thing, even ignoring what in an Earth animal would unmistakably be a threat display.  They got attacked and died horribly, of course.

 

Back on the ship, Dr. Shaw determined that the alien head (the same vaguely elephantine type we saw on the dead alien pilot in Alien) was actually a helmet encasing a large humanoid head.  The head had been exposed to the bioweapon and was undergoing some sort of biological activity, presumably triggered by the same exposure to carbon dioxide.  For some reason she thought that sticking a giant electrode into the alien’s head would wake him up – not only ridiculous, but what an awful thing to do to any being!  Anyway, it worked, and alien head predictably freaked out and then exploded.  WTF?  This makes no sense.  And then the alien DNA proved to be identical to human DNA – wait, what?  Then why are they larger and white-skinned?  Why did that one alien sacrifice himself and undergo an apparent DNA restructuring at the start of the movie?

 

When David found the bridge of the alien ship, why does the moving chair at the console react to the holo replay but not to him?  Makes no sense.

 

Things went further south when David deliberately exposed Dr. Holloway to a small amount of the black goo.  That David did this makes sense, as he was following orders from Weyland and needed a human guinea pig to see what the stuff did.  It did the same flesh-eating thing it did to the alien at the start of the movie, but at a slower rate and not before Holloway had sexy times with Shaw.

 

Dr. Shaw found herself knocked up with an alien tentacle monster and rushed to the autodoc to have it removed, but the machine objected that it was only programmed to deal with male patients.  But when we were shown the autodoc earlier, it was clearly the personal property of a female character, so this makes absolutely no sense at all.  Anyway, she made the machine remove the creature from her abdomen anyway, at great risk of killing herself in the process.  When she later returned to the same area, the creature had not only survived but grown to about a hundred times its size at time of extraction.  On what? Did it find a food dispenser in the sick bay?

In the end the tentacle monster that came out of Dr. Shaw used an organ that looks just like the snake-creature from earlier to impregnate the one surviving alien, who then hatched a creature that looks a lot like a xenomorph.  When I first saw this scene I took the implication to be that the crashed alien ship is the one we see in Alien, and this creature will be the one that lays all the eggs in the cavern (now known to be a hangar) below the ship.  But it doesn’t work because the dead alien pilot in Alien was found in the pilot’s seat with his helmet on, whereas this one died in a human escape pod that was somehow missed later.

Fortunately it doesn’t need to work, as this is a different planet.  The planet in Prometheus is referred to as LV-223, whereas the one in Alien and Aliens was identified in the latter film as LV-426.  (I take the names to be Leviticus references.)

 

At the end Dr. Shaw states the conviction that the crashed ship was intended to deliver large quantities of the bioweapon to Earth.  This is hard to make sense of – why would the aliens create humanity and then destroy it?  Regime change at home?  Why would they get primitive human tribes to document their invitation to a planet that turns out to be just a weapons dump?  If it wasn’t an invitation, then it must be a warning – and why reveal the location of your weapons dump to a bunch of savages?  And if they were actually going to wipe out humanity, why wait for us to find them first?

 

Others have documented some flaws of the film elegantly here and here and here.

 

Here’s how I rationalize a few of these things:

I think the easiest way to explain all this is to accept the evidence that Dr. Shaw was high on godcrack, and that we still have absolutely no idea what the relationship is between humanity and the aliens or what their motivations are.  The scene with the dying alien at the beginning was some fantasy of hers.

If the alien ship was really intended to deliver the black goo to Earth, the reason it didn’t was because of some accident on LV-223 that caused the incident recorded on the security holo; the one alien survivor survived because he was in stasis when the rest of his crew was wiped out.  So it was really just an accident that humanity wasn’t erased 2,000 years ago.  This is supported by the fact that the surviving alien attempted to resume that mission immediately on being awakened.

The biology of the xenomorphs just got a lot more complicated too.  We have this black goo that is apparently an engineered bioweapon.  Humanoids exposed to it get their DNA unwound and their bodies fall apart and/or explode, and rate of decay being proportional to the quantity of goo that gets in them.  A human female who copulates with an infected individual bears a squid-like tentacle monster, which has a detachable tongue that can impregnate any humanoid with something that comes out as a proto-xenomorph.  Xenomorph queens lay egg-traps that hatch face-huggers, which in turn impregnate human hosts with more xenomorphs.

What is all this?  It was simpler when the xenomorphs were just a species with an odd reproductive cycle and a high suitability to be used as antipersonnel weapons.  Now we have some kind of nanotech-like weapon that gives rise to them, as well as doing a bunch of other things?  Is the black goo supposed to be some kind of genetic randomizer?

 

Fixing this

Here’s what we know.

1. With farfetched evidence, Dr. Shaw somehow convinced Peter Weyland that possibly-benevolent aliens could be contacted at LV-223.
2. The events of Prometheus took place on a different planet than the events of Alien and Aliens.
3. Therefore the two crashed alien spacecraft are different ones.
4. Weyland-Yutani knew there was an alien lifeform on LV-426, as documented in Alien.  How they knew is unknown.
5. Dr. Shaw and David absconded with a third alien vessel and departed for points unknown, intending to find the homeworld of the humanoid aliens and get some answers from them.

Obviously there is a hell of a lot we don’t know.  What happened to Dr. Shaw and David?  Was there ever a return mission to LV-223?  Given the caginess of the Weyland corporation, I would expect them to have been transmitting all data live from the Prometheus, so they would have a pretty good idea what went down.  How did the Weyland-Yutani corporation know there was something interesting on LV-426?  Did they plant the supposed distress signal?  Was it really a warning, as Ripley suspected?

Here’s how I would fix all this:

1. Peter Weyland already knew intelligent aliens existed, but didn’t know where to look for them.  Dr. Shaw answered that question, and that was all he needed.
2. In order to pilot the alien craft, Dr. Shaw had to put on one of their spacesuits – namely the one built into the pilot’s chair.
3. Towards the end of Prometheus, Dr. Shaw was frequently gasping and pain and clutching her belly.  This was not an after-effect of the surgery, but was because she was gestating another monster.
4. The crashed ship found in Alien was the one piloted by Dr. Shaw; that was her in the pilot’s chair, having been killed by the emergence of what became the first xenomorph on LV-426 and laid all those eggs.  Presumably it tossed David’s remains outside somewhere.
5. Dr. Shaw activated the distress/warning beacon that the Nostromo picked up, and it was actually received and decoded by Weyland-Yutani long before then, which is how they knew to look there.

On having re-watched Alien and Aliens for this post, I’m struck by how well they hold up – they’re still awesomely good movies.  The rest, not so much.

 

Vacation photos

As promised, here are links to some of my better photos from my recent Hawaii / San Francisco vacation.

Akaka Falls and Hilo – mostly interesting plants.

Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park – volcanic landscapes.

Miscellaneous Hawaii stuff.

Photos of the transit of Venus.

Miscellaneous San Francisco stuff.

The Golden Gate Bridge.

The Computer History Museum.

 

San Francisco

After our week in Hawaii, Frink and I spent two days in San Francisco on our way home, to see a few of the major sights and case the place out for a possible return visit later.

Our plans got a little upset when the Testicle Squeezing Authority held Frink back at the airport in Hawaii – apparently they had never seen a keyboard in anyone’s luggage before.  As a result he arrived at a ridiculous hour of the morning and in need of sleep, so we got off to a late start on our first day.

We had a list of restaurants we wanted to try, so the first order of business was breakfast at Gott’s Roadside at the Ferry Building downtown.  Their burgers and shakes are pretty darn good but not better than what we can get at home.

 

After that and a bit of walking around downtown, we headed out to see the Golden Gate Bridge.  It was nice – that’s all I can say about it really.  It’s a big, long bridge with some nice art deco detailing on it, and a plethora of anti-suicide measures.  I guess if you’re in San Francisco and you want to off yourself, it’s pretty obvious where to go.

Unfortunately that was pretty much it for the first day.  By the time we finished at the bridge and got back downtown, it was past 10pm and we couldn’t find any restaurants that were open.  I wasn’t having any luck finding anything with UrbanSpoon or Google Maps on my phone, so we just went back to the hotel.

The next day was a smashing success though.  Our main event for San Francisco was to go to the Computer History Museum down in Mountain View, and that we did.

I love museums, but this was the most enjoyable one ever.  It tweaked all my computer nerd nerve endings with exhibits on early mechanical computing, punched cards and the census, mainframes and minicomputers, memory technologies over the ages, robotics, Lisp machines, exotic I/O devices and of course video games.  We spent five hours in there because that’s all the time we had – I could easily spend five days studying the displays in detail.  Highly recommended.

Apparently we passed within 20 miles of The Woz while there, according to his twitter feed.

Riding the CalTrain to and from the museum, it was a bit surreal to realize just how many famous technology companies and tech-heavy locales are in the area – Menlo Park, Redwood Shores, Cupertino etc.

After the museum we went back downtown to try and score some good eats.  We ended up going to a highly recommended (and deservedly so) Mexican place in the Mission called La Taqueria.  I had a chorizo burrito, and man was it ever delicious.  Then we walked over to Mitchell’s for some ice cream.  The place was packed but the wait was worth it – it instantly became one of my top three ice cream parlours by virtue of its rich creamery goodness.

 

The next day I had lunch with friends from Vancouver who had moved down here recently, then got on a plane home.

San Francisco is a really nice city – it feels like Vancouver but is much prettier.  I definitely need to go back and see more.

 

Overall I really enjoyed this vacation.  Everything went really smoothly (for me, at least) and I did everything I wanted to do.  Got some relaxation in, had some great food, saw some good sights, and most importantly got out of my routine and had some new experiences.

Whereas my last vacation (my road trip across Canada last year) was about rehashing my past, this year’s trip was chock full of new experiences and new records for me:

• Farthest west I’ve ever been: 157° 57′ W.
• Farthest into the past (GMT-10) I’ve ever been.
• Farthest south I’ve ever been: 19° 19’N.
• Doubled the number of states I’ve visited, to four.
• I realized I actually kind of like flying, so long as I can see out the window and there’s no turbulence.  It’s still cheating as a form of travel, but driving to Hawaii by road is admittedly a little difficult.
• First swim in 30 years.
• First swim in the ocean.
• First time snorkeling.
• First time in the US and A since 2004.
• First shaved ice treat.
• First burrito.
• First malasada.
• First visit to an active volcano.
• Highest altitude I’ve ever been on the ground – 9000 ft.
• First time in a tropical place.

Overall: A great success!

Hawaii

I just returned from my vacation to Hawaii and San Francisco.  It was a delightful trip.  I’ll be posting photos in a week or so, after I’ve had a chance to go through them and clean them up.

I spent a week in Hawaii, renting a condo for a week at the Vista Waikoloa Beach Resort, which I highly recommend doing – it’s cheaper than a resort hotel, quieter, and the suites are large and comfortable.  I went for this option because my friend Phloem has a place in the same building, so this made coordination easy.

Here’s what the view from my lanai looked like.  It’s adjacent to a golf course, hence the green.  If I remember right, that’s Mauna Loa in the background.

The first day in Hawaii I was a bit jet-lagged and didn’t do much except sleep and go for a swim in the pool (first time I’ve been swimming in about 30 years).  At the end of the day my other friend Frink had arrived from Calgary, and we were ready to rock.

The next day we drove into the city of Kailua-Kona to do some eating and shopping.  We had an excellent burrito at Killer Tacos, a place tourists aren’t likely to find because it’s tucked away in a semi-industrial zone.

On the same block is the largest used bookstore I’ve ever been in, with a stock comparable to the sum of the excellent Fair’s Fair chain in Calgary.  Frink and I spent a couple of hours in here and found a few treasures.

That evening we went for a swim in the ocean at a pretty beach near the resort.

 

The third day was an all-day trip to see the active volcano of Kilauea, on the other side of the Big Island.  On the way, Phloem took us to Tex Drive-In for malasadas.  If you haven’t had these before, you really should.  They’re like a sugar-coated, creme-filled donut made with sweet bread, and served hot.  You have to eat them immediately – don’t even consider warming them up later.  Amazingly delicious.  Possibly the best pastry ever.

The big island of Hawaii has quite an assortment of biomes, the most notable division being between dry and rainy.

The east side of the island looks like this: old lava that has been colonized by low, hardy drought-resistant plants.

The west side is more like this – tropical rainforest.  The division is so marked that in passing through the town of Waimea you literally drive in from arid scrubland on one side and come out in verdant farmland on the other, and it’s not unusual for half the town to get rained on while the other half is in the sun.

We stopped at Akaka Falls to see the tall waterfall and the lush vegetation, including the first time I’ve seen a free-growing banyan tree – huge!

It’s hard to tell from this photo just how much biomass is in this tree.  Here’s a shot of Phloem posing near some of the buttress roots:

I’ll post more photos of the plant life and the waterfall in a few days.

We stopped for lunch in the city of Hilo, but the intended local dining option was closed on Sunday, so we ended up not eating anything notable.

Then it was on to the volcano.

The volcano was kind of sulking when we were there – the active lava floes were not easily accessible and we couldn’t get a direct view of the open lava in the caldera.  But there were still lots of interesting things to see.

For example, this older crater on the edge of the main one.  The scale of these landscapes is something we’re not used to seeing.  Those walls are 40 stories high and very steep.  As an attempt to show the distance to the floor, here’s a visual aid made from a wide-angle and a telephoto shot of the same scene:

We also walked through an old lava tube and saw some lava-devastated and recovering landscape – starkly beautiful.  Again, pictures coming soon.

We hung around until after dark so we could at least see the glow of the lava in the caldera lighting up the smoke column:

After that it was a long after-dark drive home, punctuated with some ono grinds at Ken’s House of Pancakes.  This place has an incredible variety of food – check out the menu on the website.  Pancakes seem to be a thing in this area, coming big, thick and numerous.  They were delicious but I barely finished half my plate.

 

The next day was my first time snorkeling.  It took me some time to get used to the snorkel – at first it kept setting off my gag reflex.  I also had a really hard time overcoming my panic at submerging my face, but using a flotation device helped a lot.  We saw a middling-sized sea turtle and lots of humuhumunukunukuapua’a (I love that name) among other colorful things.  Afterward I had my first shaved ice treat and we had a pretty decent locally-grown burger at Ultimate Burger.

 

The fifth day was the main event – the 2012 transit of Venus, which is the event that led us to schedule this trip to this place at this particular time.  It was the last chance to watch Venus pass in front of the sun for the next 105 years, and we wanted to do it from up at the Mauna Kea observatory.  Coincidentally, there was also a partial eclipse of the moon the previous night that I didn’t know about.

We spent the first part of the day making our own solar filters so we could photograph the sun without ruining our cameras or eyes, and we watched the first part of the transit from our home base. Then we drove up the mountain to watch the conclusion and do some after-sunset stargazing.  I ended up not going to the summit – we stopped at the visitors’ center which is at 9,000 feet, and I found it very difficult to breathe there – just walking on level ground was cause for rapid panting.  I probably could have survived a brief visit to the actual observatory at 14,000 feet, but it would not have been very pleasant.

More photos later, but here’s one of my pictures of the transit.  The dark spot at lower right is Venus, and I believe the smaller spots near the center are sunspots. Of course other people got much better photos of the event than I did, but I’m thrilled that I was able to get even this much with a mere 200mm lens and hand-made filters.

 

The final day in Hawaii we mostly rested and reflected, though Phloem did take us for a walk over to the nearby resort hotel to show us what it was like.

It’s beyond belief – three huge buildings joined by a train, with a private lake and beach, and a pool with dolphins in it that you can pay to swim with.  It’s like a condensed microcosm of Hawaii in a way – pretend you were there without ever leaving the hotel.  I’m glad I didn’t stay here.

 

Next time I’ll post about the two-day San Francisco leg of our trip.  But I do want to note this:

Staring out the airplane window for hours while flying over the Pacific to and from Hawaii, I noticed that there really is an awful lot of water in the ocean.  I never viscerally grasped its scale before.  The same is true for the atmosphere – cruising at 36,000 feet, looking way down on clouds that seem so impressive from the ground, and not being able to distinguish the large waves on the surface from each other really drives home that even though the atmosphere is relatively thin, there is still a huge amount of space in it for things that fly.

 

Leaving my comfort zone

… namely, Canada.

If all goes as planned, tomorrow I’m heading off to vacation in Hawaii (specifically, Waikoloa on the island of Kona) for a week and then to San Francisco for three days.  Doing some volcano eyeing, Venus watching and snorkeling while in Hawaii, and tourist-nerdy stuff in Frisco.

This will be my first time outside Canada since 2004, my longest trip to the US and A, and my first time off continental North America.  I hope you are suitably impressed by my effort here.

Not too worried; air travel is safe if sometimes nauseating, and I have nothing to fear but this, this, this, this, this, this, and maybe a few other things.  Nothing to be concerned about.

I’m not taking a computer with me so probably not much communication going on until I return.