The last in my series of talks on science in the movies at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin celebrates the 30th anniversary of Star Trek: The Next Generation with a look at the “science” in the movie First Contact. In this one, I even break my own rule and talk about warp drive!
This isn’t a review, this is a love letter to the fantastic work that resulted in this awesome 1/6 scale Captain Jean Luc PicardbyEXO-6, celebrating the 25th anniversary of Star Trek First Contact. I spent an entire week on social media singing its praises and I’m doing it again here!
The first time the humans told us they sang their way through subspace, we thought it a translation error.
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We-the-hive were overjoyed to meet them. Finally, finally, it was proven that we were not alone! And though we already knew that we must not be, given the vastness of time and the multiverse, we also knew that those same vastnesses were against us. Civilizations we could meet are greatly outnumbered by those who came before us and we are too late to meet, those who will come after us and we are too early for, and those so far away that we cannot find them.
A starfaring civilization, like our own, increased the chances of meeting greatly. One of our most distant scientific surveyors sensed a faint and far away disturbance, similar to the waves our own ships make when diving into and out of subspace. An exploratory team was sent to investigate, and there at the furthest reach ever taken from the hive’s center, to our everlasting joy, we found human explorers on the far edges of their own range.
Their ships were strange to us, and their selves even stranger. Translation, and the mutual communication of peaceful intentions, was difficult. Mathematics was the first understanding we were able to share, as the basic principles do not change—though their and our systems of harnessing it are different. Science followed after, as the elements and natural laws are unchanging. So it was discovered that we-the-hive and the humans share the common ground of being carbon-based heterotrophs who consume water to maintain life processes.
These commonalities were far outnumbered by our differences. Yet, the most important thing we had in common was the desire to understand each other. With earnest effort, with forgiveness for unintended insult and misunderstanding, we worked to learn each other’s languages.
Science being an early part of our understanding of each other, we asked them about the construction of their ships. They told us of their material compositions and their subspace engines, different in design but similar in purpose to our own technology—but when we asked them about the shielding and stabilization they used to make the journey survivable, they told us only that they sang their way through.
Translations were imprecise, and their language often contradictory. Of course we believed that it was yet another translation error. We believed there was a nuance we were missing.
The humans were a very musical civilization. They were always singing, all of them. They sang for joy, and they sang for mourning, and they sang for any reason at all between the two extremes.
(Later, we would discover that this was not universally true. That those who crewed their ships were chosen from the most musical among them. We only met their singers, their travelers, their ship’s crews. How could we know differently?)
We believed, with music such a central part of their civilization, that they had given the words for song more meaning. Their subspace stabilization and shielding technology, without which any ship that dove into the confusion of subspace would be utterly destroyed and lost, had taken its name from music. We-the-hive noted the mistranslation, and worked to increase our understanding.
As our trust and understanding increased, as the human linguists became haltingly conversant in our language and we in theirs, the humans introduced to us a group of their hatchlings. It was a mighty show of trust, as they valued their younger generations as deeply as we did our own. Though still flexible, an adult human’s mind was too set in its ways to easily become fluent in another language. That of their hatchlings was far more suited to the acquisition of language. With equal time spent between their own language and ours, it was hoped that the young would grow to be adults who could serve as translators and teachers to increase the closeness and understanding of our peoples.
We allowed our hatchlings and theirs to mingle, to play together, to bond. We spoke to the human hatchlings, and the speed at which they learned our language matched the speed they learned the language of their own people. It was to be a long project, but a joyful and an exciting one.
We learned more about the humans, and they learned more about us. Along with scientific sharing, we established a small trade, exchange of goods and curiosities from one civilization to another.
Our understanding grew, but we still did not understand completely. The humans told us that they sang their way through subspace. When we could no longer believe that the translation was so deeply in error, we instead believed that the crews who piloted the human ships did not understand the technology they used. They were such a granular species, not unified. We believed that those who built the ships had not shared knowledge with those who piloted them, and so they had developed superstitions around technology they did not comprehend.
We-the-hive asked to send a pod of researchers through a subspace dive on one of the human ships. We asked for it. The humans agreed, willingly, in exchange for an equal number of their own scientists to take the same trip aboard one of our ships. Our pod and their scientists were chosen. The ships and the destination were chosen.
The pod boarded the human ship with nothing but curiosity and excitement. As the humans were wont to limit the number of dives they took and make the most of every trip, a ship carrying cargo on one of their usual supply runs was chosen. The ship was called the Merry Dancer, of the type the humans called a ‘small freighter’.
It was greatly open through the inside. The 'bird’s nest’ hung from the ceiling at the center, and there the Captain and Pilots had their stations. Room had been found to rig up two safety harnesses, to secure two individuals from the research pod where we could watch the Captain and Pilots work. The rest of us joined the singers, who stood in a line from stem to stern along the bottom of the ship.
The mood was solemn and focused as the humans prepared for the journey. The subspace engines were prepped, their rumble vibrating through the ship. The Pilots and Captain stretched their hands and rolled their necks, loosening themselves up. The singers took deep breaths and hummed, warming their voices.
“All Ready?” the Captain asked. She was a small human, her wrinkled skin a pleasingly luminous deep brown and her thickly curly silver hair tied up in many braids and twisted into a knot at the back of her head. She was called Janette, and when she spoke, in her firm and quiet voice, the crew of the Merry Dancer listened closely and with respect.
“Singers in Position,” the chief among the singers—the Lead Chanter—reported. “At your command, Captain.” He was a large human, hairless and very round, with pink skin heavily freckled with brown spots. He was called George, and his voice was big and booming as so many of the ship’s singers were. Even when he was not working he was always surrounded by the singers of the Merry Dancer, in a loud and happy group that was always singing, for they trusted him and liked to be close.
After a look and a nod with the two pilots, the Captain spoke again. “You may begin when ready,” she said. And then, informally and with a small smile, “Sing to me.”
Lead Chanter George stamped out a beat that the rest of the singers took up immediately. He inhaled a massive breath, filling his belly and broad chest to its limit. (And we had heard of the training most ship’s singers chose to undertake from childhood, exercises to increase their lung capacity and improve the volume and resonance of their voices, that they might sing loud and long without doing themselves damage. George epitomized the results, as so many lead chanters did.)
He belted out the line to song we had heard the humans singing before. A 'shanty’, they called it; an old one. It was dated from long before their species even dreamed that they could leave their birth planet and sail across the stars rather than the oceans of their homeworld.
“Oh, we’ll blow the man up and we’ll blow the man down!” George led.
And every singer through the ship, in time and at great volume, sang out in answer: “Way, hey, blow the man down!”
George spared a brief moment of attention to wink at the nearest member of the research pod as he led again: “We’ll make the trip over, won’t let our friends down.”
“Give us some time to blow the man down!” the singers responded.
The sound of their voices and the solid beat of their stamping boots vibrated the entire ship. It was clear that the acoustics were designed such that the vibrations bounced off the walls of the ship, centering unerringly on the crow’s nest. The Captain and the Pilots nodded in time as the Lead Chanter improvised the next verse and sang it up to them, as the singers responded in tuneful chorus.
The Captain’s hand clenched on a lever, the subspace engine throttle, tight enough her knuckles paled. A deep breath, and she slammed the throttle wide open in time with the singers. The engine roared briefly, outclassed only by the song. Immediately it was clear why the humans, in their language, had named their version of the subspace dive after a violent strike—the punch. It was a hard transition, swift and jarring.
Then. Oh, then. We understood, suddenly and most terribly, why the humans could not describe their subspace shielding and stabilization technology to us, for they had none.
They had none!
Their minds, bodies, and their entire ships were fully exposed to the nongeometrical confusion of subspace. The research pod, we who had asked to be there and been eagerly chosen, were caught up in it as well. Spacetime was ruffled, twisted, wrinkled, defying understanding in ways that three-dimensional space and regularly linear time never did. Unshielded subspace was a mind-destroying horror, the likes of which we-the-hive had never experienced.
And through the midst of the direful disorientation, the humans were singing.
We-the-hive discovered the principles of subspace engines, the basics for the traversing of subspace to make the lightyears of interstellar travel pass in hours, long before we used them. The dive to the space below the three dimensional and outside of linear spacetime requires mere force. Three generations were born and died while we developed the much more difficult shielding and stabilization technology, which requires finesse. Only when we had perfected it, when we could hold an entire ship in a stable pocket of three dimensions through a subspace trip, did we become starfarers.
The humans had taken a very different approach.
Lead Chanter George stood like a stone against the wind, inventing lyrics for his ancient shanty, and the ship’s singers stomped the deck in time and answered, never faltering. Above them, Captain Janette and her pilots listened hard to the song and the echoes. Their hands were on their controls, manually firing the ship’s small stabilization engines. They judged by the sound alone whether any part of the ship was warping, if it was redshifting or blueshifting out of tune or out of time.
Ship’s singers had told us, proudly, that they lived and died by their voices. We had thought it hyperbole.
The twist and shake of the ship, what the humans called the shimmy and roll and the bucking gravitational waves, never abated. The singing never ceased. In between lines of the call and response of the shanty, singers took sips of water from the bottles on their belts to keep their throats from growing dry. George communicated with his Second with brief hand signs, and sie took over leading with a different shanty—another ancient song, The Wellerman. The pilots breathed hard with the effort of concentration. Sweat beaded at the Captain’s hairline. A thin trickle ran down her cheek and neck in a jaggedly uneven line, pushed and pulled by the roiling of subspace.
The humans, with their fortitude and adaptability, and specifically the crew of the Merry Dancer with their long experience, were able to keep functioning. They could continue to work despite the tearing disorientation, else the ship and all in it would have been lost. The members of the research pod were not so prepared, and were not so adaptable. With communication disrupted between us so each was utterly alone, with the confusion and isolation overwhelming, we had all curled up tight inside our carapaces for safety, like frightened hatchlings. Only one in three were able to even peek a single eyestalk out to observe with shattered perception, to increase our knowledge and understanding as had been the intention of the trade.
(On the hive’s ship, mid journey, one of the human researchers aboard hesitantly asked when the trip was going to begin. This caused great confusion all around.)
Another unknowable and incomprehensible time later, the Second signaled to Lead Chanter George, and he led again with a third song—Roll The Old Chariot Along. The music, sure and unending, was a comfort in the confusion. The singers’ strong voices, unified, were a touchstone in the chaos.
The third song was ongoing when the subspace engine began cycling again, powering up for the punch back out. Despite the strain, despite the confused length of time of their singing, George’s voice grew in volume, and the rest of the singers followed. They overwhelmed the sound of the engine, providing Captain Janette and the Pilots with the guidance they needed through the last moments.
The second punch was every bit as harsh as the first. Space time warped, twisted, and then snapped back into three dimensional linearity. Through the transition, the singers never faltered. The reverberation of their voices rang through the ship, a joyful shout. George had his hands raised high as he led one final chorus at half time.
“Lead Chanter, singers, you may stand down,” the Captain announced, formally, and then smiling but still dignified despite her obvious weariness. “Nicely done, crew.”
Some of the singers cheered and hugged each other, or slapped each other’s backs in celebration. Others, though, ran and fell to their knees by the nearest of the research pod to them.
“What happened?”, “Are they ok?” “Are they hurt?”, “I don’t understand they just collapsed as soon as we punched!”
Lead Chanter George, trusted and respected by the singers he led, sang out calming words even as he sat on the deck beside one the nearest researcher from the pod—one who had an eye stalk out monitoring. He smiled at us, human expression of happiness. He placed one large warm hand on the back of the researcher’s carapace. He could not speak our language, but with his tired voice he sang the tone of safety—with the caress and the crooning he communicated an absence of danger as we might to our own hatchlings.
We would learn that a young relative of his was among the human hatchlings who mingled with ours, that by observing us with our own hatchlings he’d learned the way to offer comfort. One and another of the singers took up the tone, until the ship throbbed with it. The research pod were given care and reassurance, and with the sharp reduction in stress we were able to uncurl, to communicate and reintegrate and return to a harmonious whole as we worked to piece together our shattered understanding of what had occurred.
The touch and the tone were not quite the same as our own, similar enough, but different. Still, the difference was not unpleasant. In that moment, in the relief and the… the kindness, the sonorous resonance of a human singer’s voice and the softness of a human hand were fixed as beautiful. These humans were not us, not ours, but become beloved. When the research pod was reintegrated in the whole of we-the-hive, the beauty and affection remained.
We would learn that the journey we observed had been 'easy’, routine, as safe as any trip could be. The humans had pride in the safety of their ships and in the training of their capable crews—that they lost, astoundingly, merely one in two thousand ships in unstabilized dives.
They had done so much with so little, singing their way through subspace while still researching the technologies that would make it safe.
When we-the-hive truly understood the risks the humans took with every single journey, when the research pod’s knowledge was fully integrated, we knew we could not leave themwithout the advantages we had.
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The decision to share all details of our subspace shielding and stabilization technology with the humans—with our friends—was swift and without dissent.
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Edit - 04/20/21 So! This story is actually an eventual-future-worldbuilding of a short story about space shanties that I wrote in 2018, and which I have finally found a home for! The story in question sadly does not include aliens, but it does have ace lesbians singing their way through danger. It’s sweet and hope-punky and I think that if you enjoyed this one, you’d enjoy that one too!
“(don’t you) love a singer” is available in the It Gets Even Better: Stories of Queer Possibility anthology by Speculatively Queer. You can grab a copy [here]!
Apologies about the lack of article reviews lately, but I’m in the middle of suffering through writing a proposal for my PhD dissertation, which I will be defending halfway through next month (gulp gulp). I’m afraid I’ll need to take a bit of a break while I desperately write about narratives, reported speech, and deception. However, while I’ll be back to posting articles in a few weeks, in the meantime enjoy this article about how linguists could actually help us talk to aliens.
Much as this article points out that we can’t assume we will know if aliens rely on sight to communicate, in making this recipe it would be good to assume that only a few people will know how to make Gremolada (minced garlic, parsley, and lemon zest FYI). The combination of the Gremolada with some orange zest and garlic is sure to spice up your day, similar to how we need to spice up our understanding of the possible ways that aliens communicate. Good Cooking!
So, here we are talking about humans and aliens and how we might be weird to each other, but how about this to chew on. What is humans are the only intelligent species to do this before they actually had any sign there was other intelligent life in the galaxy?
Let’s be honest here. We have absolutely nothing to suggest that life is anything but a phenomena unique to earth and even if it wasn’t, we have absolutely not clue what it would look like after evolving on a planet that might even be very close to earth.
Yet still we speculate, we muse and we wonder. We’ve made serious attempts to look into the cosmos and see if something waves hello. We’ve sent messages into the void and listened to see if something will answer.
What if, in some distant star system hundred of light years away, a species of intelligent beings finally begins to ascend to the stars. What if they start studying space, exploring the galaxy, and colonizing other planets.
What if their instruments start picking up strange signals. What if one of their ships comes across an strange device floating in space that matches no natural entity. What if the more they look at it they realize that these phenomena are not natural. That something produced these things, something intelligent. Something that is not them.
What if the more they study these signals, the more they begin the realize that some of them are messages. Messages to them sent by something hundreds of light years away. What is being said makes little sense, a lot of the information has been degraded by the long travel times and many of their best researchers suggest that whomever made these things might communicate in ways very different from their own.
It throws them into a spin. There is other life in the galaxy, possibly life much like their own, and that life has tried to contact them. How could it possibly know that they exist from that far away? It must know they exist, for how would know to try and contact them?
They debate and ponder, bicker and argue before deciding that the only way to respond is to send a message back. They figure out roughly where these messages originated from by looking at the path the different messages took to pass through different parts of their territory and get a pretty good idea where earth is.
All they can do is hope their reply gets close enough that it can be found, and that the receivers will be able to eventually decipher it.
Meanwhile back on earth, they do get the message, and the response is along the lines of. “HOLY SHIT! We’ve actually made contact with aliens!”
