We Are Software Masters of the Universe...Aren’t We?
In science fiction books and movies, humanity's greatest weapon is often the computer virus. In these works, our greatest gift is the ability to program. And yet, in the real world, we are riddled with software bugs and massive insecurity.
In the last newsletter I talked about how we, as humans, are the best in the universe at programming–at least as far as we know. We are the best at a lot of things because, again, as far as we know, we are the only thing in the universe that does much with physical tools, let alone math or programming.
So, I guess, for now, we are the software masters of the universe.
Computer Viruses as Weapons
In the movie Independence Day, the aliens who blew up the White House and are trying to take over the Earth (for our water or to eat our brains or something like that) are eventually defeated by a computer virus created by humanity. Somehow we manage to communicate with their computers well enough to not only exchange data, but to crash their systems.
The Independence Day plan hinged on 1. Fixing alien technology 2. Flying alien technology into outer space (complete with chairs made for human butts) 3. Docking with the alien mothership 4. Beaming a virus onto alien mothership. 5. Then escape from exploding alien mothership. - https://www.wolfgnards.com/wolf-gnards-663/
It was on that fateful day that, David Levinson – a cable company employee and MIT alumni – took to the skies in a refurbished alien spacecraft, leaving behind an Earth ravaged by ongoing attacks. Once docked with the massive alien mothership, Levinson pulled out his trusty PowerBook 5300, equipped with a staggeringly powerful 100 MHz processor and a ridiculous 64 MB of RAM, and (somehow) began to interface with the ship. - https://www.engadget.com/2014-03-05-the-powerbook-5300-the-laptop-that-halted-an-alien-invasion.html
In a bombastic action-packed summer blockbuster romp of a movie, we ended up defeating the evil aliens with some computer code designed and uploaded by an "MIT nerd".
This is a very similar plot device to the one used by Arthur C. Clarke in his novel 3001: The Final Odyssey.
In Clarke's novel, the main characters believe that, a 1000 years later, the Monolith is now determined to destroy humanity, so they must find a way to eliminate it. They doubt that they can physically destroy the Monolith, so they decide to use a computer virus. Interestingly, humanity has a cache of its most destructive weapons on the moon, in a place called the Pico Vault.
The Pico Vault is a massive vault located on the Lunar mountain Mons Pico. It was created for the containment and safe study of computer, biological, and chemical weapons. - https://2001.fandom.com/wiki/Pico_Vault
This vault contains not only nuclear and other massively destructive weapons, but also computer viruses, which are apparently just as devastating. In the novel, the team uses one of the existing viruses against the alien intelligence, and the rapidly multiplying, sun-blocking monoliths disintegrate, allowing humanity to survive for at least another 900 years.
In these stories, humanities greatest weapons are computer code.
Is Programming Something Special in the Universe?
“If the software isn’t perfect, some of the people we go to meetings with might die." - https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff
It's hard to imagine science fiction without programming. We can't run space shuttles without computers. We can't go into space without code. That probably means that alien cultures can't either. Would (or will?) their computers looks like ours, work like ours, and be programmed like ours? Would it be as buggy as ours?
Because humans write it, our own sci-fi space software has bugs. Even NASA, knowing that people could die if the software is buggy, still makes human mistakes–like treating imperial measurements as metric, causing the failure of missions.
- Mariner crash - "A few days after the crash, the New York Times published an article explaining the cause of the crash. It said the error resulted from "missing a hyphen in some mathematical data." A NASA programmer allegedly missed the symbol while feeding "much-coded information" into the computer system." - https://www.zentao.pm/blog/the-seven-most-expensive-bugs-in-code-history-1137.html
- Ariane flight - "64-bit floating-point numbers related to the rocket's horizontal speed relative to the platform are converted to 16-bit signed integers. The number is more significant than 32767, the largest integer stored in a 16-bit signed integer, so the conversion fails. So, at 39 seconds, the rocket starts to collapse and self-destruct under aerodynamic force." - https://www.zentao.pm/blog/the-seven-most-expensive-bugs-in-code-history-1137.html
- Mars Climate Orbiter - "In September of 1999, after almost 10 months of travel to Mars, the Mars Climate Orbiter burned and broke into pieces. On a day when NASA engineers were expecting to celebrate, the ground reality turned out to be completely different, all because someone failed to use the right units, i.e., the metric units!" - https://www.simscale.com/blog/nasa-mars-climate-orbiter-metric/
Much futuristic thinking (which is fictional, of course) relies on computers of some kind, and quite often AI. But we can't have either of those things without programming. From this perspective, could we say that programming is one of the most important things humans do?
Almost everything we create, including building really big things, massive real-world engineering projects, requires some kind of computer, even if it's just a fancy calculator.
And yet, in reality, our software is riddled with problems and massive insecurity. But in fiction, we are the ones who write the good software, the great viruses; we are the ones who can easily connect to other computer and network architectures and understand them well enough to destroy them, and somehow aliens don't use our crappy software to get back at us. (Though to be fair, aliens beaming us a virus is an often use plot device as well.)
Maybe we're the software masters of the universe because we know that even alien software will have bugs, and we know how to attack them...if necessary. Or perhaps, on the other side of the coin, we can help them write better software in return for the secrets of faster-than-light travel.
Further Reading
