Dumb Science Fiction Part 2: Aliens are Stealing Our Women! And Water! Or Whatever!

As a writer, if I had to name a single definitive requirement of good storytelling, it would be motive. Why characters do something is just as important if not more important than what they do. So, when science fiction writers want to write a story about aliens, they often try to give them some simple, easily understood need that they've come to our planet to fulfill. Sadly, these simple motive are usually really dumb. 

The Martians ran out of water on their world, so they've come here to take ours!

The Martians are an ancient, dying race, and they need to breed with our women to revitalize their genetic stock!

Or: Oxygen! Nitrogen! Silica! Or maybe they really like fish, and have overfished their ocean world. Maybe they need slaves to work in their moon mines! Or maybe they just need to take our moon, since the moon of their own word got blown up by accident, and ours is just the right size and mass for a replacement. 

The reverse also pops up: There's an element available on planet X we don't have here on Earth! There's a floating sulphur shrimp in the clouds of Venus that contains a protein that can cure cancer! The nouns can be replaced with nearly any other nouns. Whether they come here and we go there, the motive is always that something is available in one place, but not available in another place.

And why not? That's the historic reality here on Earth. Tobacco was available in America. Tea and spice in India. Oil in the middle east. Cod in the North Atlantic. Different places have different resources, and the imbalance between these resources creates conflicts, which is a valuable commodity that authors cherish above all else. 

But what works at the level of nations and in the past starts breaking down if you scale it up for science fiction. Sailing from London to Charleston to purchases something to smoke is closer in scale to walking to the corner grocery store for cigarettes than it is to travelling to another solar system in search of a resource. The cod of the North Atlantic and the silk of Japan might seem quite distant when we instinctively measure the world by how far a single step can carry us. On interplanetary scales, the cod and silk are located at the same tiny blip on the star map. 

What's more, the cod and the silk are made of exactly the same thing. Carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and a handful of other elements mixed together in slightly different ratios, but still all made of the same building blocks. If your neighbor owns a life-sized Eiffel Tower made of Legos, and a life-sized Tyrannosaurus rex made of Legos, you don't have to steal his Eiffel Tower to have your own. You just need a lot of Legos and a pattern. 

This is the ultimate barrier to resources being a good excuse for interplanetary travel: the whole galaxy, and every planet in it, every comet, star, and speck of interplanetary dust, is made of Legos. And by Legos, I obviously mean atoms. These are not a rare commodity for any civilization capable of interstellar travel. There is zero point in travelling to Earth to steal our water, because the universe has water everywhere. If you come from an alien world that's getting a little parched, you don't need to go through the hassle of sucking up our oceans. First, it's guaranteed that there's still an almost endless supply of water on your world. Maybe you've contaminated it with heavy metals or pathogens, but, if you can develop the technology to invade a distant world, you can probably also develop a much cheaper and more efficient technology to decontaminate your own water. But maybe there's some science fictional handwavium reason your planet destroyed its water. You were testing an experimental teleporter and, uh, sympathetic vibrations in the water molecules of your alien lab rat caused all water on your world to vanish. You absolutely must go off planet for more! Fine. Check out the cloud of comets around your solar system, since it's probably how your planet wound up having water in the first place. Just go lasso a few of those and you can refill your oceans in a geological blink of an eye. 

What's true of water turns out to be true of everything once technology advances far enough. You don't need silkworms to make silk. You need to know how to arrange the most ubiquitous atoms in the universe into the right order. If you were an advanced enough civilization to come  here and steal women to repair your genetic code, it's a fairly safe bet you can just rewrite your genetic code without the absurdly silly step of trying to mix it with an entirely different species. If we did discover a miracle protein in Venusian sulphur shrimp, if a Venusian sulphur shrimp can manufacture it inside its cells, we'll be able to replicate it inside a test tube. 

Any substance you can dream of, it will be easier for an advanced civilization to build it at home than go to another planet to get it. And, I'll be generous, and say that "at home" can include easily exploited neighbors, like moons and asteroids. 

So why would we ever need to explore other worlds? The only legit reason I can think of is that, while we can manufacture anything we dream of, our capacity for dreaming has limits. Maybe it's child's play to manufacture the wonder drug found in Venusian shrimp once we know it exists. But a giant barrier to knowing it exists is that the Legos we play with can literally create an infinite number of possible shapes. We could build the most powerful AI ever designed and task it with the duty of imagining potentially useful molecular configurations, and a million years from now it still might not have given us the shrimp protein. No matter how good we make our AI, the universe itself is a creation engine that's been running for fifteen billion years or so, which gives it a head start on making cool stuff.  

Exploring other worlds, we wouldn't be mining them for their resources. We'd be mining them for information. We'd be on the hunt for alternative instruction manuals on how to make new materials out of the same building blocks we've always had in our grasp. This isn't something you need fleets of warships to bring home. A few autonomous drones could collect samples, and a orbiting chemistry lab could send back the recipes via coded laser pulses. If we do it right, the aliens would never even know we were there. 

Which is equally true going the other direction. Right now, there's no reason that we aren't absolutely crawling with tiny alien seekers exploring every nook and cranny of our world, from the ocean's depths to our small intestines, looking for molecules they've never seen before. 

Alas, I just can't imagine selling a lot of tickets to a science fiction epic called Mars Wants Molecules!