Why I am Nostalgic for Big-Brained Aliens

All this spring, my son Connor and I have been watching of the original Star Trek on Netflix.  Connor likes the original shows almost as much as The Next Generation, and even I find myself getting caught up in some of the more classic episodes like Space Seed (the one with Khan).  I also really like the pilot, The Cage.  That’s the episode where Jeffrey Hunter is Captain Pike, trapped on a planet run by bubble-headed alien telepaths who throw him in a zoo with the luscious Susan Oliver.  (Poor bastard.)

As we watched this particular episode—Connor for the first time, me for the bazillionth—it occurred to me that the Big-Brained Alien is one science fiction trope that has pretty much disappeared.  As far as I can tell, it has gone the way of the jet-pack and the glass-tube elevator.  This dearth of chrome-domed alien baddies is just another indication, I suppose, of how much things have changed. Back when I was a kid, every extra-terrestrial was guaranteed to have a skull like a beach ball.  Even the wise, Christ-like alien Klatuu from Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still had a big head (although this was probably no one’s fault—Michael Rennie just had a big damned head!).

Remember those aliens who want to invite all of humanity over for dinner in the classic Twilight episode, To Serve Man?  Huge heads.  Or the killer vegetable alien in The Thing.  Huge freaking head.

As to how this visual cliché came about in the first place, I can only assume it was because of Anthropology class.  Specifically, all those anthropology classes that educated, middle-class kids started taking in college during the Cold War.  For the first time, ordinary people began to learn about human evolution, and how the human brain has tripled in size during the last two million years.  The implication was obvious.  Bigger brains means bigger intellect.  To extrapolate this trend into the future led to the obvious conclusion: beings of the future will have enormous brains.

In other words, the original Big Brained Alien is…us.

Now, of course, the dream worlds of science fiction have left such notions of bio-centric evolution behind in favor of a more cybernetically-based vision.  According to current science fiction novels, the future of humanity lies not in bigger brains but in electronic ones.  Man will not evolve into the Star Child, as Keir Dullea does at the end of 2001.  Rather, he will evolve into a robot.

I have to confess, I can’t work up much enthusiasm for this kind of story.  Watching Star Trek at the age of thirteen, it was easy to imagine myself having a huge brain (what teenager doesn’t think he has a huge brain)?  But I never imagined myself being transhuman (that is, a computer).  It doesn’t sound like very much fun.

Unfortunately, the Big-Brained Alien idea deserved to be retired.  I, too, took anthropology classes in college.  My teacher, a great swarthy Irishman named Stuart McCrae, once said:  “If our brains get as big as they are in science fiction movies, how the hell are mothers going to give birth?” 

It’s an obvious fact of human evolution that, as Homo Sapiens’ brains have enlarged, our gestation period has shorted, so that humans are born in a more infantile state than any other mammal.  This was the great compromise Mother Nature struck with humanity: the only way to get those melon-headed babies through the birth canal is to eject them earlier, before the skull (and the brain) has a chance to grow too much.   Presumably, any advanced alien species would have just as much trouble with big-headed kids.

More to the point, as digital technology has progressed with such breathtaking rapidity over the past fifty years, so have our notions of intelligence and, yes, even consciousness.  We still have no freaking clue what consciousness is, but most scientists agree that it probably doesn’t require a big, organic brain to create it.  It might not take a brain at all.

Still, I just can’t buy the notion that as soon as computers reach a certain minimum threshold of complexity, they will magically awaken into consciousness.  Nor can I believe that we will soon be uploading our personalities into robot bodies.

Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer my science fiction with real, live, flesh-and-blood.  Even Commander Data wanted to be human, after all.

Author’s Note: a slightly different version of this post first ran on my old blog, Bahktin’s Cigarettes.