War stories
The science-fiction action adventure movie Aliens is one of my all-time favourite films. I've watched it countless times, in the cinema, on video, on DVD and now on Blu-ray in the directors cut and the original theatrical release. I know the whole film off by heart yet I never get tired of watching it. Just like the original movie alien I think the visualisation is superb: it pretty much all looks real (except for one single effect, which is the drop ship entering the atmosphere).
James Cameron had several designers come up with ideas for the drop ship that took the Marines from the Sulaco to the planet. Design after design, he finally gave up on them to come up with on he liked and constructed his own drop ship out of a model of an apache helicopter and other spare model pieces.
I love the "Colonial Space Marines" and their equipment. I love the way they storm in and then have to survive as it all goes wrong. I love their vehicle and their assault cannons, their auto-sentries and their flamethrowers. Fantastic. And what exciting future it would be!
We all know, of course, that they won't really be like that. The most advanced military machine that we have today, the US Armed Forces, already employs more drone pilots than actual pilots. They're building robots that can climb stairs and sensors that fit in tiny mechanised bees. We would really fight the aliens on the distant planet LV-426 by sending in men and women? I don't think so. By the time we're mining asteroids in the year 3000, the standard intergalactic assault will be to send in nano bots to get a DNA sample of the enemy and then use it to engineer a virus that will wipe them out in a week. A couple of days after I wrote the first draft of this post, I read
From state-sponsored cyber attacks to autonomous robotic weapons, twenty-first century war is increasingly disembodied. Our wars are being fought in the ether and by machines. And yet our ethics of war are stuck in the pre-digital age.
As is often said, science fiction isn't really about the future. It's about now. The Colonial Space Marines fighting the aliens represent US Marines fighting asymmetric wars around the globe right now. (And just as in the movie, they won't be held to win unless they take off and "Nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure".)
The role of technology in the future of conflict will be critical but it won't be romantic. I don't see my great-grandchildren reading the equivalent of the Commando picture library that gripped me when I was a kid, or watching movies like Apocalypse Now or Saving Private Ryan.
In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen megabytes