Friday, July 12, 2013

Alien sizes

I am sure the fact that "Pacific Rim" is a tongue-in-cheek remake of "Godzilla" with steampunk costumes will not have escaped the attention of even the laziest moviegoer. So instead of pointing out the obvious, I want to ask a very different question: what is the relationship between size and intelligence in SF?

Most fictional and cinematic aliens I can think of are of human size. Even those that are not humanoid in shape, are commensurate with us: a little bigger, a little smaller but that's about it. In movies especially, while alien machines are often huge (to do as much damage as possible), the aliens themselves, with tentacles or not, could shop in Gap. I can think of some texts where aliens are giants but very few where they of a size either so big or so small that we would not perceive them as beings at all but rather as a part of landscape. The Strugtasky brother's Roadside Picnic and Little One (Malysh) explore this possibility and so does Lem's Solaris. Not surprisingly, the aliens in these texts are impossible to communicate with.

So does it mean that size matters more than shape in identifying a creature as intelligent? I don't know the answer but suspect this is the case. Dolphins have been the subject of many studies in animal intelligence but whales not so much, even though they are at least as sentient.

Even in "Pacific Rim" where the Kaiju are improbably big, too big to move on land, let alone fly as one of them does (!), the monsters' adversaries are giant human-shaped machines piloted by teams of two. If the alien is to big, we have to make ourselves commensurate with it in size.

So perhaps it is our cognitive biases that make us seek out Earth-size planets for intelligent life. Perhaps intelligence is right under our noses, in gas giants, clouds of dark matter or collapsed stars. It is just too big for us to notice.