When science fiction is at its best, it’s about much more than spaceships and rayguns. It’s about ideas. It’s about what it means to be human. That’s why I love Gattaca so much: it’s basically a story about the fact that our greaest limitations are the ones we place on ourselves. Sometimes, however, sci-fi is just plain wrong about human nature.
“It’s in your nature to destroy yourselves”
This line form Terminator 2 sums up how felt growing up during the end of the Cold War, palpably afraid of nuclear holocaust. But think about what a ridiculous sentiment this is for a moment. There’s an obvious retort from evolutionary biology that any species that seeks to destroy itself is, well, incredibly unfit. Self-destructive creatures clearly aren’t going to produce a lot of offspring and evolve to take over the planet. But there’s a different, more subtle response that focuses more on human nature, but we have to draw on Darwin again.
Basically, life is competition, and the strongest competitors produce the most offspring and dominate the gene pool. Very rarely, however, do animals battle to the death. Humans are different because we’re generally smarter and we’ve invented all sorts of fiendish ways to murder each other. Our competitive instincts have spiraled out of control.
The trick with civilization is that we have to act civilized. We have to direct our competitive instincts to the proper pursuits, like sports and business. We have to find better ways to solve conflicts without resorting to murderous violence. We have a long ways to go.
“Entire crops were lost”
In The Matrix, Agent Smith tells Morpheus that the human brain isn’t wired to accept a world without suffering where everything is provided. This is part of his indictment of humanity, and he clearly sees it as a failure of the species. What kind of screwed up organism can’t accept having every need met? If you give bacteria all he nutrients they need, they grow so fast that their DNA starts a second round fo replication before the first is finished. Surely humans are at least that evolved.
The catch, of course, is that bacteria can’t ever move above the first level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. If you provide a human with everything, then there are no problems to be solved. No way to achieve self-actualization. People need challenges, an external ruler to measure themselves against.
Even if science fiction sometimes fails to get human nature right, it continues to spark the imagination and provide us with visions of the future. By exploring human nature—right or wrong—we’re also challenged to shape that future.
