Friday Meanderings: TechnoRoaches and Postbiological Aliens
X-Files Insectoid Robot Aliens and Our Future
I’m still doing a slow re-watch of The X-Files (along with The Last of Us and catching up on the Mission Impossible franchise).
I had a particular X-Files episode on while I was making dinner one night earlier this week that made me want to write a little, so here we are!
In the delightfully bizarre X-Files episode “War of the Coprophages,” Agent Mulder finds himself investigating a rash of deaths in a small Massachusetts town—allegedly caused by cockroaches. But these aren’t ordinary roaches.
These bugs appear to be impervious to injury, potentially robotic, and may even have extraterrestrial origins.
Naturally, things spiral from mildly gross to hilariously paranoid. Scully remains skeptical, while Mulder is left wondering if these poop-eating bugs are probes sent to Earth by an alien civilization.
The episode was one of those written with a more comedic take on the usual X-Files storylines. Darin Morgan, who’d had a small role as a creature early in the show, became a writer and some of his scripts are the funniest of all of the X-Files canon—he wrote the episodes Humbug, Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose, Jose Chung’s From Outer Space, Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster, The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat, and the War of the Coprophages.
In the episode in question, Mulder heads to the charmingly unfortunate town of Miller’s Grove where people are dying under mysterious—and suspiciously buggy—circumstances. The culprit? Cockroaches. Or maybe robot cockroaches. Or maybe hallucinogenic panic. Hard to say.
As the townspeople spiral into full-on bug-fueled hysteria (including one man who literally dies on the toilet), Mulder finds himself knee-deep in poop, paranoia, and possibly extraterrestrial entomology. Scully attempts to offer rational explanations while Mulder tries to decide if he’s being swarmed by aliens or just losing his mind. Add in an entomologist named Dr. Bambi Berenbaum (and some sexual tension with Mulder), a bunch of twitchy exterminators, and a lot of squishy sound effects, and you’ve got a classic X-Files mix of absurdity and dread. The truth may be out there—but in this case, it might be crawling under your fridge.
It’s a fun watch, but what really caught me this time around was some dialogue offered by the character of robotics expert Dr. Ivanov when talking about the possible future of space exploration using small, insect-like robots:
“The goal is to transport a fleet of robots to another planet and allow them to navigate the terrain with more intricacy than any space probe has done before. It, it sounds slightly fantastic, but the only obstacle I can foresee is devising a renewable energy source. In any case, this is the future of space exploration. It does not include living entities.”
The idea of sending out not just our current types of robotic space probes but in the near future making them ever smaller and more agile (with various modes of ambulation or flight) much like insects is one that’s been around for quite some time.
Here’s just a short list of some examples:
Entomopter Project: Developed by Robert C. Michelson and his team at Georgia Tech starting in the 1990s, the Entomopter is a flapping-wing micro air vehicle designed for planetary exploration, particularly Mars. Its design mimics insect flight to achieve high lift in Mars' thin atmosphere.
Swarmies: Not really insect-sized (at least not modern insects), but these little wheeled robots were designed by engineers and interns at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. Designed to mimic ant and other eusocial insect behavior, these robots can work together to search for resources, making them suitable for planetary exploration missions.
Marsbee Project: NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts program funded the Marsbee project, which envisions swarms of robotic bees with flapping wings to explore Mars. These robots aim to combine the mobility of flying insects with advanced sensors for data collection.
Micromechanical Flying Insect (MFI): Initiated in 1998 at the University of California, Berkeley, the MFI project focuses on creating tiny, insect-like flying robots (intended to be no more than 25 mm from wingtip-to-wingtip). These robots are designed for reconnaissance and exploration in environments inaccessible to larger machines.
With where AI and automation is going, it’s even more likely that our future robotic explorers will do a good bit of their exploring through their own choices (and then connect back with us to let us know what they’re finding).
But science and sci-fi alike has carried these ideas through to another likely conclusion: if we can see ourselves sending out swarms of robots, perhaps aliens could do the same as well.
Here’s some more dialogue from War of the Coprophages between Mulder and Ivanov:
Mulder: I'm just speculating here, but if extraterrestrial lifeforms do exist...
Ivanov: Oh, there's no need for speculation, I believe they do.
Mulder: And assuming that they're more technologically advanced than we are, and if your own ideas about the future of space exploration are correct, then...
Ivanov: Then the interplanetary explorers of alien civilizations will likely be mechanical in nature. Yes. Anyone who thinks alien visitation will come not in the form of robots, but of living beings with big eyes and gray skin has been brainwashed by too much science-fiction.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with Dr. Susan Schneider, who had joined me for an episode of Ask an Astrobiologist quite some years ago.
Susan is an expert in philosophy, AI, and cognitive science, and she currently leads the Center for the Future Mind at Florida Atlantic University. She and I had gotten into a discussion before our episode about the likely for our current flavor of biological and technological civilization to be coming to an end (and flowing into something radically different and postbiological in nature). We wondered together, if there is a likelihood of this happening soon in human history and assuming that alien biospheres often proceed along some paths that will lead to postbiological civilizations, then there is a good possibility that any alien civilizations we meet might be postbiological themselves. Some might be mergers of organic beings with technological constructs, some might be what we would think of as autonomous robots, and some could even potentially be like humongous swarms of eusocial drone spacecraft sent out in large numbers to explore other star systems for resources.
And we certainly aren’t the first people to wonder about these potentials.
The mathematician John von Neumann back in the 1940s envisioned self-replicating machines that could be sent out to explore the cosmos. Now known as Von Neumann Probes, the idea is that small, intelligent, and automated probes would be sent out (by us or by an alien civilization) into space. The probes could harvest raw materials from asteroids or planets to build many more copies of themselves which would then also be sent out, enabling a form of exponential exploration or observation of the galaxy. The idea has gone on to inspire a lot of science fiction stories, some of which force us to face what might be a rather uncomfortable thought: most advanced alien life might be postbiological and, thus, radically more advanced than where we are currently.
There might even be swarms of insect-like beings out there moving across the galaxy right now. Or Von Neumann Probes slowly advancing from world to world to harvest resources and send data back home (wherever that “back home” might be).
Maybe our own likelihood of sending out insectoid robotic explorers to other worlds in the near future is a good sign that others out there in the cosmos might be doing the same already.
Anyway, that’s the kind of stuff that runs across my head when I have The X-Files on in the background while making dinner. And hopefully it’s something fun to think about for this Friday Meandering.