Alien: Earth, Ep 1 - Climate Report Card
Aug. 24th, 2025 08:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
labingiI enjoyed episode 1 of Alien: Earth. It seems a pretty good show, but for this post I'm just going to evaluate its performance on addressing climate breakdown. I've only seen this ep. once and wasn't taking notes, so feel free to chime in with what I missed.
Baseline: the show is set in 2120, about 100 years from now, i.e. in the middle of dealing with either a) voluntary radical change in how civilization lives on the Earth and/or b) involuntary climate breakdown, with much of the Earth being uninhabitable. How is the show doing with that reality?
* Handicap point: It's trying to maintain continuity with Alien's timeline, which is from the 1970s. (+1)
* Massive technological advancement with no sign of climate impacts on industrial infrastructure, etc.: -1
* Paradisal, verdant island forested with mature trees many of which are probably over 100 and no signs of climate damage or commentary (that I caught) on how this can be: -1
* Community that looks like it has adjusted to significant sea-level rise: +1
* Metropolis with flawless skyscrapers, greenery and no sign of climate damage or slowdown in materials extraction. (To match physical reality, it must have one or the other.): -1
* Massive department stores with many aisles of clothing and splashy ads suggesting that marketing-driven, fast-fashion culture has persisted unchanged for over 100 years without resulting in biophysical ruin for much of the Earth. -3 (This is projection grotesquely out of step with all realistic projections.)
TOTAL: -4
For research I'm drawing on, see the first two sections especially of this bibliography.
Baseline: the show is set in 2120, about 100 years from now, i.e. in the middle of dealing with either a) voluntary radical change in how civilization lives on the Earth and/or b) involuntary climate breakdown, with much of the Earth being uninhabitable. How is the show doing with that reality?
* Handicap point: It's trying to maintain continuity with Alien's timeline, which is from the 1970s. (+1)
* Massive technological advancement with no sign of climate impacts on industrial infrastructure, etc.: -1
* Paradisal, verdant island forested with mature trees many of which are probably over 100 and no signs of climate damage or commentary (that I caught) on how this can be: -1
* Community that looks like it has adjusted to significant sea-level rise: +1
* Metropolis with flawless skyscrapers, greenery and no sign of climate damage or slowdown in materials extraction. (To match physical reality, it must have one or the other.): -1
* Massive department stores with many aisles of clothing and splashy ads suggesting that marketing-driven, fast-fashion culture has persisted unchanged for over 100 years without resulting in biophysical ruin for much of the Earth. -3 (This is projection grotesquely out of step with all realistic projections.)
TOTAL: -4
For research I'm drawing on, see the first two sections especially of this bibliography.
no subject
Date: 2025-09-02 09:36 pm (UTC)For context, our cultural default is still to pretend climate change isn't/won't be a problem, to be silent. Weather reporters get death threats for mentioning that a hurricane was likely worsened by climate change. No government in the world is taking effective actions to mitigate it.
Emissions are not only not falling, but annual emissions are still rising. Not only are annual emissions still rising, but they are beginning to accelerate again. This is due in a large part to AI, a fact almost never discussed outside of "climate" circles. I just took a cybersecurity training today on the pros and cons of AI. We were encouraged to use it; they assured us it wouldn't take our jobs. Not a word about emissions or water use. Ditto at my "progressive" college: hand-wringing about whether/when AI is pedagogically helping/hurtful, no word about climate.
No sustainability plan at all - our "progressive" five year strategic plan has one word about sustainability: it is "sustainability" at the dead bottom of a list of values, attached to no goals, initiatives, key performance indicators, or benchmarks.
This is like if a TV show were about a Jewish family in Germany in the 1940s and had no mention of anti-German sentiment except maybe a small piece of anti-Semitic graffiti in the background on a wall. And if that show's position was, "Well, this show isn't about the Holocaust," my response would be "The Holocaust is there, and your failure to address it is tantamount to Holocaust denial, which is not okay, whether or not you purport to be about the Holocaust or not."
I know I'm tripping off into a rant mode here, but we're talking about the impending deaths of hundreds of millions of people and a Permian-level extinction event looming--soon, the deaths, if not the full extinction, within our middle-aged lifetimes.
On our current trajectory, by 2025 (that's 25 years, when we're in our 70s), Haiti (where my kids' birth family lives) will probably be effectively uninhabitable due to 100+ wet bulb heat days per year. Many, many Haitians will die. Many more will be climate refugees (and we can already see how that's going for people). Their culture will probably be mostly wiped out within a generation due to fragmenting by diaspora. Multiply that by much of the Earth's surface.
Media has a responsibility in this, most particularly left-leaning media that purports to be critiquing our current cultural excesses, which Alien: Earth does well in other respects.