Aliens as Commodities?

Commodifying aliens? Really?

In the movie The Seed, three friends – Heather, Charlotte (nicknamed Charles) and Diedre – go to a remote luxury home in the Mojave Desert to party and witness meteor showers. During the meteor event, something drops into the pool. Is it a piece of a meteor? It’s too soft to be one. It turns out, a small sized alien is revealed, stinking, covered in black ooze and…dead?

Charlotte believes it is a baby. Heather and Diedre, not knowing what to call this disgusting creature a few names including a bear and a hyena. Brett, who has to fill in for his brother the gardener, believes it is a dead armadillo until he pokes it to life and runs away screaming.

Charlotte brings the “baby” into the house after she hears it crying in the middle of the night. She wraps it in a blanket and gives it milk. The plot twists as Heather and Diedre are seduced by the alien by hypnotizing them and then engulfing them in some sort of huge plasma looking substance.

Somehow the alien decides not to do the same to Charlotte. Instead it reveals its disturbing nature. Charlotte drives the house buggy to their neighbor, Edna, whom she discovers has technological equipment and books filled with calculations and a drawing of the alien. She also discovers that Edna shot herself with her rifle in an apparent suicide.

Charlotte drives back to the place and confronts Heather and Diedre whose demeanor has radically changed overnight. As Charlotte pleads with them to dispose of the alien and go back home, Diedre rails against Charlotte as having weak character, and is only trying to take away from them the alien who most assuredly has significant market value.

The plot twists again when suddenly the bellies of Heather and Diedre begin to balloon. The alien has impregnated both of them, slowly transforming them into aliens themselves.

It sounded absurd at first that the alien would be viewed as a commodity in the marketplace, but then I remembered Aliens, where Weyland-Yutani company representative Carter Burke played by Paul Reiser cautions the crew of the Nostromo who is being attacked by the alien not to destroy the creature because of its significant market value for biological weapon research.

It would be the human thing to do to attempt to commodify a creature more powerful and dangerous than ourselves. I posit that because of our evolution, from discovering fire, domesticating seeds, taming animals, building civilizations and armies to protect them, that we feel capable of subduing anything for profit, even aliens.

Of course, we have no idea what extraterrestrials actually look like. The creatures we portray are purely out of our imagination, not actual accounts. We have a mixed bag of relations with them as well, from the benevolent E.T. to the warrior Predator. We even successfully petition aliens not to destroy us, as in the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, while we defeat them in films like Independence Day and the Starship Troopers series.

But as with everything larger than ourselves, we believe we can have some sort of relationship with it, where we somehow become equals, even partners. Welcome to the world of Star Wars, Star Trek, and all the other science fiction franchise series.

Even our concept of God is rooted in the idea that we have a relationship with a supreme being. Otherwise, what would be the point of believing in something larger than ourselves? We must be relevant in our environment, whether it be on earth, in the cosmos, or in the spiritual realm. We crave to hold a value therein, and possibly rise to a higher level. Historically, emperors and kings believed that they were either demi-gods, or gods themselves. They established this by wielding extraordinary power, often egregiously.

One of my favorite quotes is by Dr. Hannibal Lecter in the 1986 film Manhunter based on Thomas Harris’s book Red Dragon, “If one does as often as God does, one becomes as God is.”

Having goods on the marketplace is one way of controlling our environment. If something can be obtained, controlled, and valued, it can be sold. There is merit to producing products and services that benefit our lives by making it more comfortable and convenient. It gives us the capacity to engage in humanitarian activities and participate in community uplift.

And, it is a utilitarian practice of allowing the suffering of a few so that the masses may benefit.

This practice is strongly depicted in the story, The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas, where a utopian society is created and maintained by the suffering of one boy locked in a dark corner. Those who could turn a blind eye enjoyed their utopia. Others who could not, walked away.

Many of us protest the suffering of others domestically and around the world in war and famine, while we ignore the sweatshop workers, shack dwellers, and others who make our cell phones, fashions, appliances, and so many other affordable and accessible products.

Some would call it a necessary evil. Others would call it hypocrisy.

We want to be relevant in the extraterrestrial universe, whatever that may look like. If we were to participate, it would be hundreds to thousands of years down the road, if we survive the changing climate, or if we do not destroy ourselves. Relevancy would include the ability to travel through space in minutes, and the capability to communicate with higher intelligent life forms.

But would we still possess a colonizing mentality? Would we retain that frontier mindset of taming new lands and beings, and exploiting the resources? One may argue that higher life forms would have the same idea as we would. I cannot project such, as I would surmise that higher intelligent life forms would operate out of logic and reason, not emotion and basic instinct.

In the meantime, our human technology remains stunted. We have greatly evolved our artificial technology, but our relations and practices are problematic. We have invented new languages and created new organizations to battle them and though there have been some triumphs, we still exploit and commodify anything and everything within our reach.

As the rest of the world watches the invasion of Ukraine, we believe that Putin’s methods are not just reprehensible, but alien to us. But what if we humans are the Russia of the universe, would we be looked upon as the aliens? I know that if I were an extraterrestrial, I would not go anywhere near Earth, and I would be very vigilant, with Photon torpedoes pointed at the third planet from what is known to humans as their Sun.

Mess with the aliens if you want to, you might end up in their lab.