6 Things I Hated in Independence Day: Resurgence (SPOILERS)

1. THE NAME OF THE MOVIE

"Hey, what's a word for, uh, like, something happening again?"

"Repetition? Rehashing? Recycling? Redoing? Remonstrance? Renaissance? Resurgence?"

"Um...I was thinking more like 'revenge' or 'return'..."

"Nah, those are over-used, tapped out. If we call our sequel to Independence Day 'Revenge' or 'Return', people will think we're unoriginal and can't come up with new ideas. Now get back to writing scenes where fighter jets fight alien airplanes and stuff blows up."

2. THE MAGIC SCHOOLBUS STARRING JUDD HIRSCH AS MS. FRIZZLE

Judd. You're better than this, Judd. You really, really are. So why are you back here, doing this, Judd?

You have to believe in yourself, Judd. You have to have faith.

See what I did there?

It's good to see you laughing again, Judd. Now get back out there and get yourself some real work.

3. IRON-AGE TECHNOLOGY

Harvester Queen: "Human vermin, surrender to us and accept your fates, as we tunnel through your planet's crust and harvest your molten core! Your atmosphere will wither and your planet will be laid waste! Tremble and despair!"

Dr. Levinson: "Wait...our planet's molten core. You mean the, ah, the big rotating ball of molten iron at the center of our, um, ah, our planet."

Harvester Queen: "Yes, inferior scum! It will fuel our weapons and drive our technology as we bring countless civilizations to their knees! I mean, if they have knees. They might not have knees. Don't be racist against people with no knees. Anyway that's not the point! Prepare for your doom!"

Levinson: "So your technology is powered by...molten iron. That's what, ah, powers your ships and stuff. Um, ah...how does it, ah, do that exactly?"

HQ: "It, uh...well it, um...look, it just does, okay? Our power systems are completely based on molten iron. Because molten iron is...really...hot. And...liquid. And...that's...that's what our technology needs, that's just how it works."

Levinson: "Because you can get iron anywhere. It's in asteroids all over this solar system. Mercury's full of it, too, and Mercury's not even inhabited. Nobody there to stop you from taking aaaaaallll the iron you want. Yep. Place is lousy with the stuff. No need to come to Earth at all, actually. Lots of iron in the universe. It's, ah...pretty common, especially for a species with advanced space travel technology and the proven ability to make huge moon-sized spacecraft. Like, one that probably already understands space mining and construction technology to a pretty amazing degree."

HQ: "But...but that iron isn't molten. It's molten iron we need, haven't you been listening?"

Levinson: "Yeah, but the thing is, you can heat iron up, any iron, until it is molten. We humans have been doing it for thousands of years, it's how we build cities and Toyotas and bar stools and stuff. You know, all the hallmarks of human civilization."

HQ: "Impossible! How is this done?"

Levinson: "I mean, I'd be happy to teach you if it means you leaving us alone. It's done different ways, but these days it usually involves using a furnace fueled by coal to get the iron up to a really high temperature..."

HQ: "What is this 'coal'?"

Levinson: "What, you don't know about coal? It's the fossilized remains of ancient organisms, buried deep underground under intense pressure over millions of years. It's not a renewable resource; still, you can find it in pretty large quantities underground on Earth. I guess that's actually something you probably couldn't get anywhere else. Um, I mean..."

HQ: "Okay, new plan, we kill all the humans and mine all of Earth's coal!"

Levinson: "Crap."

4. PROGRESSIVISM

Whitemale McComicreliefson: "Hey, I hear you're Asian and everything. Wanna bone?"

Chinese Fighter Pilot: "Dinner first!"

[In the audience, a couple of elderly white men and younger white dudes wearing backwards baseball caps chuckle quietly. The rest is awkward silence.]

5. SO YOU'RE A HIVE MIND: A SELF-HELP GUIDE FOR WORLD-CONQUERING ALIENS

"If your species has evolved in such a way that you have a hive consciousness, you may be having trouble with pesky inferior races occasionally blowing up one of your queens, causing your soldiers to become catatonic and your technology to default to simplistic autopiloting routines such as 'Return Home'. This can be an annoying setback to your plans for galactic domination.

"Here's a tip: if you bring 2, 3, or even 4 queens along on your invasion, and keep them in widely separated and secure facilities, it will lessen the chances of your invasion being put on hold. If you can't do that, then it might be worthwhile to invest in research into more robust artificial intelligence control technology. It doesn't have to be too complicated - instructions as simple as 'Keep Extracting Resources Until All The Humans Are Dead' might save you a lot of trouble down the road.

"Now get out there and conquer the universe!"

6. EMPEROR QUIRXON 004'S THE ART OF WAR

Mysterious Orb: "Nobody has EVER killed a Harvester Queen. They're IMPOSSIBLE to kill. Give up now."

Dr. Oken: "But you said you've been fighting this species for hundreds or thousands of years, and they have been fighting countless other intelligent species across the galaxy. And...none of them...nobody has ever had the idea of putting a bomb in a thing and setting a trap and blowing them up?"

MO: "A...trap? What is that?"

Oken: "Or a computer virus? Do you guys know about computer viruses? Man, that worked super great last time. I don't know why we haven't tried it yet this time around...anyway, you guys basically are computers, right? You know about computer viruses, don't you? Harvester technology seems to be really susceptible to them."

MO: "Computer...virus? Like giving a computer a cold? Look, human, if you're not going to take this seriously, I'm hopping the next artificially-generated wormhole out of here."

The Rise of the Robots: Contextualized

(Image credit: Solen Feyissa, via Wikimedia Creative Commons)

Technology is just a word.

From Greek "Techno", meaning "art" or "skill", and "Logos", meaning "word", "technology" literally means "words concerning skill".

Of course English-speakers don't use it that way today.  According to my research, this word entered our language around 1610, and initially translated as "systematic treatment of an art, craft, or technique" - i.e., a treatise or discussion of a specific art or skill.  It wasn't used to mean "science of the mechanical and industrial arts" until about 1859, and the term "high technology" - high-tech - doesn't appear until the 60s.

Cast your mind back.  18th century writers might apply the term "art" or "artifice" to express what we mean today when we say "technology"; in the 19th century one might say "industry"; and as recently as the 1950s or even later, you'll often see the term "industrial arts" applied to, say, high school classes which might today be called "tech ed".  I think that today, most of the time, when we say "technology", what we really mean is "engineering", or at least the products thereof; we're talking about the creative solving of technical problems, and the objects or techniques which come out of that process.

Perhaps, in the modern context, there's also a sense that technology is synonymous with progress - especially when we add the word "advanced" - "advanced technology" implies better technology, or technology which is further along some kind of understood chronological continuum.  I believe we think this way because we stand, right now, at the end of more than a hundred years of extremely rapid development in many areas of science, engineering, and medicine - we have a clear example in our recent past, in our Western society, of the passage of time equaling technological development, and can cavalierly make statements like "in 1900 most people still rode horses, but in 2013 we can orbit the Earth."

Lord Kelvin, who in 1902 famously said:

"No balloon and no aeroplane will ever be practically successful."

But as heady as that kind of "progress" might be, it's also kind of terrifying.  I was born in the 1980s, and so I am intimately acquainted with the notion that by the time I have grandchildren, I pretty much won't recognize the world.  Many generations all across the late 19th through early 21st centuries have encountered that phenomenon - things change fast in today's world, and that mostly seems to be due to all the widgets and doodads we obsess ourselves with.  Consider what 175 years of technological progress might have looked like in, say, the Middle Ages: four generations might live and die in the same village, without anything changing much, as far as the way people did what they did.  Not to say that technology didn't change society in the Middle Ages - but the rate of change was dramatically slower than it is today.  Traditions survived from generation to generation, which is how they became deeply ingrained in society.  They didn't have to adapt, because very little changed.

Now we live in a world of constant change, and many of us are killing ourselves trying to keep up.  I've had a chance to witness this in many contexts: grandparents seemingly unable to communicate with grandchildren, or grown adults breaking down emotionally when faced with a new phone or computer, or companies, school districts, and governments breaking the bank just to equip their members with the latest tablet.  When one takes a step back, it all seems so insane.  It seems as if an outside force has begun to afflict humanity: a force of wires and switches, of electrons and radio signals, of silicon chips and water-cooled mainframes.

I think in many cases, we see technology as a menacing Force with a will of its own - something we are helpless in the face of, something which will crush us if we don't learn how to appease it.  Change can engender fear, and fear can cause something mundane to appear as a Colossus.  I think that sometimes, we believe the Rise of the Robots has begun.

What I feel we have to remember is this: those robots would not exist without us.

Smartphones are handy technological devices.  Many of them can do practically anything you need them to, as long as that need is computing, communication, or information-related.  Most of them used to have integral, physical keyboards - this, in fact, was the initial selling point which helped the BlackBerry company snag a huge sector of the smartphone market.

But physical keyboards are out of favor in smartphones.  Why?  No reason at all - except economics.  One of the most popular and visible brands in the industry - the iPhone - has no physical keyboard, and by the kind of follow-the-leader correlation which sometimes drives market economics, most other smartphone-producing companies dropped physical keyboards as an option on their devices.

Does the move away from physical keyboards on smartphones constitute a technological advancement? No.  It's nothing more than a preference regarding input. If you doubt me, just think hard about how often your "autocorrect" function actually gets it right.

The point here is that technology changed, it changed the way people do things - but the change was not necessary, not irrefutably logical, and driven by very human forces - namely, money.  Technology, in this case, is not out of our control - it is a profoundly human force.

As I write this, it's been almost 40 years since humans last walked on the Moon.  This fact - that we've never gone back - has often been evinced as an argument for why we never went in the first place.  The assumption is that technology moves "forward" chronologically - that once we've done something once, we will only ever do it easier and more cheaply as time passes and techniques improve.  Ergo, if we've been to the Moon once, we must be able to do it again, and often; therefore, we never went in the first place.

Wrong.

Recall who it was that said "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard" - that's right, it was this guy:

And guess who it wasn't?  That's right, this guy:

Now, which of the above two gentlemen was in office when Apollo 11 landed?  Sadly, it was not dear John, who died before he could see his pet initiative come to fruition.  Nixon was the one who called Armstrong and Aldrin on the phone to congratulate them, in what I've always amused myself by thinking must have been a damn bitter pill to swallow.  "Hello boys, congratulations on stunning the world by pulling off the culmination of my predecessor and bitter political rival's most enduring legacy."  Ouch.

Within two years of Apollo 11's historic flight, the final three missions of the Apollo program - the originally projected Apollos 18, 19, and 20 - were scrapped, or their assets reassigned for other purposes (such as Skylab).  Nixon - and Congress - decided that, the stunt having been successfully carried off, there was no need to continue to spend what in modern terms would be over $12 billion annually.  That's how Nixon's government saw lunar exploration: an expensive stunt, championed by a predecessor and former bitter rival; a chapter to close, rather than a springboard to new advancements and new discoveries.

In the early 70s, NASA was still planning for crewed Mars missions in the early 1980s, using nuclear thermal rocketry as its main propulsion (a technology which has been thoroughly tested on Earth, yet never used in space).  Given the money, they certainly would have attempted it.  But Nixon and Congress earmarked that money for the Space Shuttle instead - a project they deemed more economically feasible, and, I'm sure, to some extent, more "Nixon" and less "Kennedy" in spirit.

Again, we see money - and also ego - being the main forces behind an era of technological change - in this case, holding back technological advancement.  Technology didn't progress linearly - the engineers focused on its development simply changed their course, according to what was politically and financially feasible.

Technology was not a force unto itself - it fell prey to the whims of the humans who controlled it.

In closing, I'll restate my opening: Technology is just a word, a word whose meaning has fluctuated a lot over the centuries.  Our attitude toward technology also fluctuates; it can be an aid or a curse, a boon or a menace, something which will save us, corrupt us, or destroy us.  These don't have to be purely esoteric or geeky concepts - you don't need to look to Asimov or Kurzweil to help form your attitudes here.  Just think about how it makes you feel to try and set up a new computer, or figure out a new app on your tablet, or get your BlueTooth devices to talk to each other.

These are all tools - tools crafted by humans, to extend our capabilities.  At least, that's what they should be - all too often, the main concern is not to extend capabilities, but to extend the bank accounts of executives, or the political capital of politicians.  Technology doesn't just happen in a lab or a computer - it's a product of the money which funds that lab, the mind that designed that computer.  Without us there would be no technology.  Even if Skynet rises from our ashes to dominate the world, it and all its descendants will owe their existence - their very form - to us.

Which may not necessarily be a comforting thought, but it might help you survive your next frustrating encounter with your iPad.