‘District 9’ director is no neophyte in an alien land — chicagotribune.com
Alright, now I have to see this film. The directory is a Singulatarian! Doesn’t hurt that it also has a 94% on Rotten Tomatoes at the moment.
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Q: So what has pop culture missed in terms of alien contact?A: No one has posed this to me before. My answer would be just pure nerd science.
Q: That’s fine.
A: Well, Ray Kurzweil’s singularity theory [about the merging of human DNA with technology] I fully believe in. Like Michio Kaku, he says there’s this idea that the power of a society that can harvest the power of an entire planet is at a 1. We’re only at .7 or .8. We’re not even a 1. A society at 2 can harvest the power of the entire sun. And a 3 is harvesting the entire galaxy. He says societies always get to 1 and wipe themselves out. Which is why we never see life in the universe on a radio wave or whatever. They keep dying off. But if a society were to go through those stages, and there was a merging with technology and a new form of DNA-based intelligent life was created, that merger would then allow that society to build micro-spaceships that would travel under the speed of light to where they want to go and they would choose to make themselves known to us or not.
Q: That’s very complicated. But if they ended up living among us …
A: But they wouldn’t! There is no way they would. The ultimate outcome occurs in Kurzweil. There’s this thing he calls “dumb matter,” and the ultimate outcome is that “dumb matter” turns into “intellectual matter,” then planet-size pieces of intellect compute how to leave their universe. It’s the single craziest thing I have ever read, but ultimately what I think will happen. Anyway, it’s beyond us. Either we become more than human, which means we become beyond xenophobia and know how to handle them, or they come to us and we don’t know they are here.
Q: This sounds like a documentary.
A: Totally. All of that stuff is so complicated. But I also love genre movies and all the nerd geek stuff too. Some of [the hard-core science stuff] will end up in my movies, but the movies have to be a thrill ride, and the science needs to stay science.
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