Problems of an Alien Nature

Aliens are integral to the superhero mythos we enjoy every Wednesday. After all, the age of heroes did start with a baby falling from the sky. At a certain point it’s almost easy to take all the myriad of non-humans running around for granted, but then I realized how far we are from finding life out in the void here in the real world. This discrepancy gave me pause. Of course I’ve thought about the absurdity of the way aliens are portrayed in comics, and have been hesitant to write about it because I want to say something scientific about it rather than just complain, but today I “can’t stands no more” to quote a swarthy sailor. So here are just some of the issues I have with aliens in comics.

First and foremost, the universe is big. Really big. Think of the biggest thing you can think of. Then double it. Twice. Yeah, it’s probably still bigger than even that. And the distances between actual stuff is staggering. It took human astronauts 4 days to get to the moon from earth. It takes a photon one second. So when we start talking in distances that takes light years to travel, hence the unit of distance known as a “light-year”, we’re really stepping outside our solar neighborhood. And there are always cosmic workarounds for this, like worm-holes, boom tubes, and zeta beams, but that isn’t really what irks me. What irks me is that in the entire universe so many wayward species have made their way here. This isn’t totally unreasonable, depending on the values you plug into the Drake equation (an equation used to estimate the potential number of technologically advanced civilizations in our galaxy), you could get a number that makes one think that we’re more or less surrounded by other alien races. But why would they always wind up on earth? From a narrative point of view it makes perfect sense, our planet is where the stories need to be told unless there’s a good reason not to. But to a scientist it almost smacks of geocentrism (the idea that the earth is the center of the universe). Sorry, Oa, but I just call it like I see it.

However, the above really represents more of the astronomers grief, I’m more of a biology type so another one of my problems is why do the aliens always look so humanoid? In a previous post filled with funny images I talked about other sentient animals on earth. Two of those were the chimp and bonobo but besides that there was little consistency in morphology (body shape). I don’t think an upright posture, two arms, and a head containing the brain and other sensory organs is necessarily the only setup for an intelligent race.  We’re talking about beings that evolved on a totally separate path from us. Even granting panspermia (the idea that life was seeded throughout the galaxy, thus we’re all related), everything living on earth evolved from a single point and has diverged to the innumerable forms we see today. You have more genetic material shared between you and a tulip than you would with any alien you might encounter. Yet as always, I don’t like to gripe without coming up with a solution that at the very least allows myself to read the comics anger free. Even though for the life of me I can't figure out why martians, our cosmic neighbors, look so weird whereas Krytonians look like a typical WASP. So my thinking is that species whose bodies evolved to look similar to humans tend to be the species that come here for an extended stay. And the really nasty customers go find a planet where everyone looks more like them. Thus, Starfire is welcome but Starro keeps getting sent home.

So we let the hotties stay on earth because… well they’re hot. Yet that’s still pretty disturbing. These things are not human, they just aren’t. I can’t quite see how being attracted to an alien is much better than bestiality. I suppose Clark Kent has an excuse since he was raised among us. But Dick Grayson should know better. Really though, what people do in the bedroom is their business, what bugs me is when they leave the proverbial bedroom pregnant. Crossbreeding is a fun concept because you can mix and match as the story dictates, but it’s so far-fetched! Take a mule. A mule is only made from a male donkey and a female horse. The opposite combination, a female donkey and a male horse, is called a hinny, and you’ve never heard of it because they’re really hard to make. Even just switching the sexes like that causes chromosomes to misalign and no hybrid to be found. Yet we’re supposed to believe a Kree and Skrull can successfully reproduce? (Then again, Skrulls can mess with their DNA so who’s to say?) The point I’m trying to make is that extraterrestrial relations, while being a little unsettling, should not be successfully reproductive. Like ever.

I’m not asking for perfect scientific realism, just the occasional nod to some of the more glaring absurdities. Kirkman at least mentioned that Viltrumites have special DNA that allows them to bed their way across the galaxy. But how about some sense of scale? There’s no way 7200 Green Lanterns can actually patrol the entire universe, unless it’s much emptier than we thought. As with anything scientifically dubious, I know that it comes down to telling a good story, which is fine. But there are cool stories to be had in superhero comics by dealing with some of the real issues of space, distance and DNA. I also just tend to wonder if people still see UFOs in the DCU…

Is it possible Ryan Haupt is just annoyed that there’s a successful movie based on the idea that aliens would look like robotic trucks? Perhaps. However, you can hear him talk to dudes who hunt aliens for reals on his podcast Science… sort of.