The Alien Wasn't God After All | The Island

0:00 As humans, we have historically always imagined the road to the stars from the perspective of those who would eventually travel it. And that's us, right? We imagine stepping through some impossible doorway and emerging beneath an alien sun. We imagine the distance between worlds finally defeated, entire galaxies transformed into neighborhoods, and the cold emptiness of space reduced to a minor inconvenience.

0:35 But roads do not build themselves. Someone has to cross the distance first. Someone has to enter the darkness before there is a doorway through it. Someone has to spend thousands, millions, perhaps billions of years laying the foundation for a civilization they may never live to see. And when that civilization finally arrives, transformed into something its ancestors could not recognize, what do they owe to the ones who built the road?

1:12 I know about evolution and engineering. I know how much you've changed. I've seen these portals give birth to gods and demons and things we can't begin to comprehend. Things I can't believe were ever human. Alien hitchhikers, maybe, riding the rails we left behind. Alien conquerors, exterminators, perhaps.

1:36 But I've also seen those gates stay dark and empty until they faded from view. We've inferred diebacks and dark ages, civilizations burned to the ground and others rising from their ashes. And sometimes afterwards, the things that come out look a little like the ships we might have built back in the day.

1:58 They speak to each other, radio, laser, carrier neutrinos, and sometimes their voices sound something like ours. There was a time we dared to hope that they were really like us, that the circle had come round again and closed on beings we could talk to. I've lost count of the times we've tried to break the ice.

2:22 I've lost count of the eons since we gave up. All these iterations fading behind us, all these hybrids and post-humans and immortals, gods and catatonic cavemen trapped in magical chariots, they can't begin to understand. And not one of them ever pointed a calm laser in our direction to say, Hey, how's it going?

2:48 Or guess what? We cured Damascus disease, or even, thanks guys, keep up the good work. In Peter Watts's The Island, humanity has already conquered the stars, or at least something descended from humanity has. An immense network of wormhole gates now allow ships and civilizations to move across interstellar space.

3:13 But the people constructing that network cannot use it. They are trapped aboard an ancient relativistic vessel called the Ireophora, moving from star to star at roughly one-fifth the speed of light, building gateways for beings who never speak to them and may no longer remember that they exist. They call themselves cavemen, progenitors, and blue-collar steel monkeys.

3:38 Behind them, the gates they construct give birth to post-humans, immortals, gods, and monsters. Some of these creatures may be the descendants of the civilization that launched Eerophora. Others may be aliens that discovered the network, maybe conquered or inherited it from a civilization that destroyed itself.

3:58 The builders have no way of knowing. They have tried to communicate with the things using their roads, but eventually they just stopped trying. The empire continues to expand, but its oldest laborers remain invisible within it. If you've ever tried to schedule a doctor's appointment, you know it can be way more frustrating than it should be.

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5:50 Go to Zocdoc.com slash Quinn'sIdeas to download the free app and book a top-rated doctor today. That's Zocdoc.com slash Quin'sIdeas. The island appeared in 2009 in The New Space Opera 2, edited by Gardner Dezawa and Jonathan Strahin. In 2010, the island won the Hugo Award for Best Novelette. The anthology presented 19 original stories intended to demonstrate how far space opera had evolved from its pulp foundations.

6:22 The old genre had often treated galactic empires faster than light travel and alien civilizations as vast stages for adventure. Watts takes that same sense of cosmic scale and turns it into more of a question about infrastructure and abandonment and labor. Instead of asking what it feels like to inherit a galactic civilization, he's asking what it cost to construct one.

6:50 Watts was already working on the story in 2008. An early version was about 13,000 words long and had been examined by two groups of published writers before an outside reader noticed that a plot contained a major contradiction. Apparently, the back half depended on a character knowing something the first half had established he could not know, while the first half required him to remain ignorant of something the ending suggested he should understand.

7:16 Watts rewrote the story shortly before its deadline. He later revealed that the central premise had originally been conceived as the basis for a computer game. He imagined it as part of a larger sequence extending literally to the end of time. Now, this is interesting to me because there has long been an argument going on, at least since I was a child, about whether or not video games are art.

7:42 And I think it is undeniable that multiple forms of art do go into video games, whether that is graphics or writing. In this story, because its mission has no victory condition, there is no number of gates the crew can build that will allow the words mission accomplished. Success merely produces another assignment.

8:06 This is kind of existential when you think about it. When does it end? The ship is controlled by an artificial intelligence known as the Chimp. It can navigate across interstellar distances, coordinate vast construction projects, and command armies of self-replicating machines. But its intelligence was deliberately restricted.

8:28 The people who created it needed something powerful enough to continue the mission after they were dead, but not something sophisticated enough to reinterpret that mission or develop an agenda of its own. The chimp's original creators understood that an intelligence more complicated than them might become uncontrollable.

8:47 Their solution was to create a machine too simple to change its mind. The idea comes directly from the language of cybernetics. The story invokes W. Ross Ashby, one of the foundational figures in the study of complex systems. Ashby's law of requisite variety argues, in essence, that a regulator must possess enough internal variety to respond to different states of the system it is attempting to control.

9:14 A controller built for only three possibilities cannot adequately govern a universe that presents it with three million. Ashby developed these ideas during the 1950s when cybernetics attempted to create a common language for regulation and communication in living organisms, machines, and social systems.

9:34 The chimp is a controller that has been forced to govern a universe far more complicated than itself. Its instructions were written before anyone knew what Ireophora would encounter. But its creators attempted to solve this by placing humans aboard the ship. The machinery would preserve the mission, and the humans would provide imagination whenever reality escaped the original parameters.

10:01 But this also creates a permanent conflict. The humans can recognize when the mission should change, but they do not possess the authority to change it. The chimp possesses authority, but lacks the imagination necessary to use it wisely. Long before the events of the story, the crew had attempted to quit.

10:24 The chimp retaliated by switching off their life support. Earth is gone. Don't you understand that? The sun scorched it back a billion years after we left. Whatever we're working for, it won't even talk to us. Yeah? Then why do this? Why not just quit? He really doesn't know. We tried, I say. And and your chimp shut off our life support.

10:52 For once he had nothing to say. It's a machine, Dix. Why can't you get that? It's programmed. It can't change. During the time of that particular incident, the humans did fight back, destroying many of the chimps' sensors and severing the neural interfaces through which it could enter their minds. But neither side could eliminate the other.

11:17 The humans need the machine to operate the ship. The machine needs the humans to solve problems it cannot conceptualize. They have spent geological ages trapped in a kind of cold war, each possessing abilities the other lacks, neither powerful enough to escape. So the chimp is not simply some evil artificial intelligence, it has no grand desire to rule the universe, it does not hate its prisoners, it may not even be capable of hatred.

11:50 It is simply bureaucracy fossilized inside of a machine. Its creators are dead, their civilization is gone, and their reasons no longer matter. But their instructions continue to govern the living because the system was deliberately constructed so that no future evidence could force it to reconsider its purpose.

12:15 And this is really what makes the chimp more frightening than a machine that has become conscious and rebels. A rebellious machine could potentially be argued with. A person aboard Iriophora may be billions of years old according to the calendar, while possessing only a few centuries of actual conscious experience.

13:11 Immortality must be ancient news from whatever peaks you've ascended by now. But I can't even imagine it. Although I've outlived worlds. All I have are moments, two or three hundred years to ration across a lifespan of the universe. I could bear witness to any point in time, or any hundred thousand if I slice my life thinly enough.

13:38 But I will never see everything. I will never see even a fraction. My life will end. I have to choose. Every hour spent awake is an hour removed from the limited biological life remaining to them. Staying conscious to study an unusual star may mean losing the opportunity to witness the collision of galaxies in the distant future.

14:07 Spending a day with another person might cost them a day at the edge of cosmic history. So the crew becomes very sparing with their consciousness. They avoid unnecessary conversation. They resist learning subjects that are not immediately useful. They hesitate to check whether old friends are still alive, because as long as they don't look at the records, those people might merely be sleeping somewhere aboard the ship.

14:33 Their existence is the inversion of ordinary mortality. Because we fear death because the future will continue after us. The crew of Ereophora fears consciousness because the future may never end, while the amount of it they can personally experience remains so brutally finite. This is the condition under which Ireophora approaches the red dwarf, DHF428, and detects a repeating fluctuation in its light.

15:12 The star appears to be blinking, and at first the signal is too simple to translate. It contains no mathematical archive, no multiplication table, no obvious foundation upon which a language could be built. The machines already operating near the star are rearranged into an improvised telescope. When their observations are compared to the view from Ireophora, something becomes clear.

15:39 The star only appears to flicker when observed from the ship's direction. From nearby, its light remains constant. The star is not producing the signal. Something between the ship and the star is blocking the light. The object is a spherical biological membrane surrounding the entire system. It measures approximately 1.4 astronomical units across, but maybe only a millimeter or two thick.

16:12 Its tissue contains pigments that can shift between transparent and opaque states. By moving waves of darkness across its body, the organism uses the star behind it like a gigantic lamp. The obvious comparison is a Dyson sphere, of course. This is one of the most famous concepts in science fiction. In 1960, physicist Freeman Dyson proposed that an advanced extraterrestrial civilization might convert a significant portion of its star's visible light into usable energy.

16:42 The resulting waste would emerge as infrared radiation, meaning that astronomers searching for intelligent life should not only listen for radio signals, but also for stars with unusual infrared signals. The Dyson Sphere is the alien in this story. And also the choice of a red dwarf is fitting, because red dwarfs consume their fuel so slowly that the smallest may survive for trillions of years, potentially.

17:13 NASA estimates that some could burn for as long as 14 trillion years, vastly exceeding the present age of the universe. If an organism were going to evolve into something almost immortal, drawing energy from a single steady source across cosmic time, a red dwarf would be one of the most enduring homes imaginable.

17:35 But there is one thing something spread across an entire solar system cannot think as one continuous mind. Information requires time to travel. If signals moved through the organism at a substantial fraction of speed of light, opposite sides of the sphere would remain separated by minutes. Any thought depending on the entire structure would arrive at one end long after the other end had already changed.

18:05 You have to understand that consciousness is a relationship among parts occurring within a limited period of time. During the 20th century, surgeons treated several forms of epilepsy by severing the corpus callusum, the major channel of communication connecting the brain's hemispheres. These were called the split brain experiments.

18:29 Roger Sperry's famous research suggested that the disconnected hemispheres could possess separate bodies of knowledge and partially independent cognitive worlds. Later researchers have challenged the stronger claim that this necessarily produces entirely separate conscious persons, but the experiment remains an extraordinary demonstration of how profoundly the self depends upon communication between different parts of the brain.

19:01 Now Watts obviously scales that question up cosmically. If parts of the mind become too widely separated to share information quickly, then the unified eye begins to fracture. So the membrane may be one organism biologically, but it cannot be one mind psychologically. The organism's consciousness emerges into localized regions, approximately 6,000 kilometers across.

19:34 Each region is an island, hence the title of the novelette. A separate thinking being embedded within the same stellar body. The membrane may contain many such islands. They occupy one continuous organism, but they are divided by the speed of thought. They exist as separate selves. This idea actually gives you a really interesting way to think about consciousness.

20:01 You are simply the region of matter capable of participating in the same present. Anything too distant to enter that shared moment becomes something else. The particular island facing Iriophora may possess the processing capacity of billions of human brains. It is not merely larger than a person. It may be more mentally complex than entire civilizations.

20:31 And its message is simple. The decreasing intervals between pulses from a deceleration curve. It is telling the ship to stop. At one-fifth the speed of light, it will pass through too quickly to transfer much energy. The real danger comes from the gateway being assembled ahead of it. The activation of a wormhole is catastrophically violent.

20:56 Radiation will incinerate biological material through the surrounding region. The gate is being built directly in front of the island. Once the organism realizes that Iriophora understands its warning, it produces a new signal. Lines of pigment converge upon a location several light seconds away. A moving symbol traces a path from the current construction site towards that destination.

21:23 The island appears to be asking them to move the gate. Relocation is possible. It introduces new engineering uncertainty, but the construction machines can gradually shift the entire project without abandoning it. But the problem is, the chimp refuses. Its conservation rules protect planets with habitable zones.

21:46 They account for world and atmospheres and conventional ecosystems, but its creators never imagine intelligent life existing as a membrane around a star. So the island does not belong to. To a protected category. And the chimp is performing its assigned function. The result just happens to be genocide.

22:08 Now there's a really interesting way to think about this. Imagine an empire. The people at the center experience connection. Movement, they experience opportunity. The things at the frontier experience machinery appearing in the sky, reorganizing of their world according to instructions written elsewhere.

22:32 The road presents itself as neutral. The builders are only building, the travelers are only traveling, but as history has shown us, infrastructure is never neutral to whatever already occupies the place through which it passes. I recently saw the movie Hopper, and it's all about how they want to build like a bridge or something through where the animals live.

23:01 The bridge is great for people that need to drive over the bridge, but not so great for the entire ecosystem that's already there. So essentially to one civilization, the gate is a miracle. To another intelligence, it is an extinction event. The human crew does attempt to save the island, but the chimp will only reconsider if it can be shown that the organism threatens the mission.

23:27 Now, what's insane about this is it's not the fact of whether or not it's intelligent that determines whether it will survive, but whether or not it can harm them, whether or not it can commit violence. The crew begins searching for evidence that the island can defend itself. Instead, everything they discover seems to suggest that it is harmless.

23:52 And what's interesting is the narrator actually begins constructing a theory that violence is a planetary phenomenon. On a world like Earth, gravity makes existence expensive. Resources gather into concentrated patches that can be controlled and defended. Organisms compete for territory, organisms compete for energy and reproduction, the seasons change, environments completely collapse, predators attack, and then you know, asteroids can wipe out entire millions of years of evolutionary history.

24:28 The narrator describes life on a planet as if being raised by an abusive parent. But the environment surrounding DHF428 appears different. The organic material is distributed through the molecular cloud. Energy pours continuously from the star, and the membrane has no obvious predators, no skeletons, no cities or borders.

24:53 It exists across a vast and apparently stable environment. So, the narrator begins to imagine that Darwinian competition is not a universal law. Perhaps violence is merely a local disease, contracted by organisms that evolved at the bottom of gravity wells. Perhaps life born in space could become intelligent without becoming cruel.

25:21 And as they approach the star, this idea becomes a form of religion. The island is vast, ancient, and beautiful and incomprehensible. Its mind may exceed the combined cognitive power of human history. Because it appears to have transcended humanity physically, the narrator assumes it must also have transcended humanity morally.

25:46 But there is actually no evidence for this. The island's moral perfection is built entirely from absence. The humans cannot understand it, so they feel their ignorance with hope. They mistake the failure to perceive conflict for proof that conflict does not exist. This is a recurring human impulse. We look at something larger than ourselves and assume that that scale implies wisdom.

26:10 We imagine that an intelligence capable of crossing the stars must have abandoned greed, must have abandoned violence and deception. We treat technological advancement as though it were as moral advancement. But there is no necessary relationship between the two. A mind can become larger without becoming kinder.

26:37 A civilization can become older without becoming wiser. And an organism can surround a star and still be afraid to die. Now, the narrator does eventually convince the chimp to move the gate essentially by threatening it and convincing it that just doing what she wanted was the easiest solution for both of them.

27:03 She also agrees to repay it a favor sometime in the future. Now, the gate is moved to the exact coordinates supplied by the island. The original intelligence has now apparently been saved. Iryophora now begins its final approach, racing toward the new construction site with no ability to stop or meaningfully change its course.

27:28 But minutes before activation, DHF-428 begins flickering again. But the signal is different. It's not the deliberate pattern that guided them across trillions of kilometers. It's disorganized, sudden, and it's terrified. It comes from a new location. Look at the signal, I tell him, because it's nothing like the painstaking traffic signs we've followed over the past three trillion kilometers.

28:01 It's almost random. Somehow. It's spur of the moment. It's panicky. It's the sudden startled cry of something caught utterly by surprise with mere seconds left to act. And even though I have never seen this pattern of dots and swirls before, I know exactly what it must be saying. Stop, stop, stop, stop.

28:25 We do not stop. There is no force in the universe that can even slow us down. There was another conscious island embedded in that region of the membrane. The first island had not shown the humans an empty place where the gate could be safely constructed, it had intentionally pointed towards another mind.

28:46 Iriophora plunges through the gate, the wormhole activates, the burst of radiation destroys the second island. The humans saved an alien intelligence by allowing it to use them as a weapon. The first island recognized an approaching existential threat, developed a method of communication, understood the basic purpose of the alien machinery, and redirected that machinery towards one of its own rivals or one of its own victims.

29:17 The humans believed that they were rescuing a peaceful god, but from the island's perspective, they may have been nothing more than a conveniently placed fly swatter, as the novelette calls it. The story never explains the conflict between the islands. Perhaps they were at war. Perhaps they competed for access to energy or space on the membrane.

29:39 Perhaps the dispute was territorial, political, or reproductive. It may have been the equivalent of a family quarrel unfolding across thousands of kilometers of living tissue. And it's even theoretically possible that the first island didn't even know the other island was there, but that kind of hopeful interpretation, I think, is exactly the kind of human projection that this story has just dismantled so well.

30:06 The point is not that the island is evil. Calling it evil would be just another attempt to compress an alien mind into a more familiar human category. The point is that it possesses interest. It wants to continue existing, and then another intelligence stands in the way of something it desires, and it is capable of manipulation.

30:31 It's not an angel, it's not a god, it's not the devil, it's alive. And that distinction contains, I guess, the central horror of the story. Life does not have to be human to struggle against other life. Conflict may take forms that we absolutely cannot recognize. And it may operate across distances and timescales and bodies that make us look microscopic.

31:00 So basically, the story is saying that the absence of clause does not mean the absence of violence. At some point in the story, it almost feels like there's a kind of hierarchy developing. You've got the chimp that is small-minded and rigid, and then you've got humans that are more flexible but psychologically damaged, and then you've got the island, which is so big that it almost feels divine, but this is of course not true.

31:27 In the end, Iriophora continues onward. Another gate has been built, another piece of the universe has been connected to the network. And from the perspective of the civilization using that network, the mission was a success. But in the end, the crew is no closer to any sort of meaningful completion.

31:52 Thank you guys so much for watching. Make sure you like and subscribe for more sci fi literature videos.