I went to see War of the Worlds this weekend. The immersive experience, in London. They gave me a top hat for the souvenir photo. I’m not sure it’s my best look but somewhere between the Victorian steampunk staging and the purple light and a gramophone the size of a small car, it felt like the least of my worries.
Jeff Wayne’s version has been soundtracking British anxiety since 1978. Richard Burton’s voice - replaced now - but the music still hits somewhere uncomfortable. Dramatic. Grand. A little ridiculous, in the best possible way. (And yes it has aged - but only a bit).
Standing there in my hat, surrounded by Martian machinery, then wandering through Victorian Britain meeting characters who were suffering unquestionable pain and hurt - and death - I thought: what if they did come? Not tripods. Just something we blundered into. Because that’s increasingly less science fiction and more genuine question.
Where Is Everybody?
Enrico Fermi looked up from his lunch in 1950 and asked exactly that. Any civilisation with a modest amount of rocket technology and an immodest amount of imperial incentive could colonise the entire galaxy within tens of millions of years. The maths works. The universe is old enough. So why the silence?
Maybe every civilisation keeps quiet precisely because there’s a very good reason to do so. A cosmic omertà. The whole galaxy agreeing not to make eye contact.
And then there’s us. Sending golden records into space with our location, our faces, and our music. Very ‘hello, please don’t be aggressive’. Very British, really.
Peter Sandberg - whose music has reached 700 million streams and soundtracked Stranger Things - told me he thinks about writing as excavation. You’re not constructing something new. You’re uncovering what’s already there. I wonder sometimes whether space exploration is the same. We’re not so much reaching out as digging up something we’re not sure we’re ready to find.
What Would They See?
If something intercepted our signals right now - our broadcasts, our encrypted military traffic, our social media - what would they conclude?
There are approximately 56 active armed conflicts on Earth at this moment. Over the last year, fighting raged on in Ukraine, Sudan, Myanmar and the Sahel. Israel and Iran continue to trade blows, the Lebanon is being raided to the ground, with the United States joining in, taking the lead - because they want to ‘keep world peace’. How ironic. Thailand and Cambodia clashed. Afghanistan and Pakistan exchanged fire in their worst incident in decades. Drone strikes have jumped 4,000% in five years! Hundreds of non-state armed groups are now wielding them.
We’ve democratised new ways of killing people so thoroughly you can order the components online, while simultaneously arguing about whether to fund clean energy.
Martin Metcalfe sat across from me and said, matter-of-factly: “We have invented an alien.” He meant AI. But I keep thinking - any sufficiently advanced civilisation doing due diligence before making contact would look at our current situation and quietly back away. Which might, in fact, explain the silence.
We are, it turns out, the cautionary tale.
The Question
HG Wells wasn’t warning us about Martians.
The Martians in his novel behave more or less like Victorian Britain behaved toward the peoples it colonised. We know best. We have the technology. We’re taking this. The book was satire dressed as science fiction. Jeff Wayne gave it a laser show. The satire stayed.
What do we do when we encounter something we don’t understand? Do we reach for the weapon or reach for the hand?
We’re still working that one out down here.
Might be worth getting a bit further along with the answer before we go knocking on other doors.
People. Planet. But Progress?
- Scott (in his Sunday cosmic pyjamas)