for them. This seems likely for the truly alien species. After all, we have a lot of water here and although an alien aquatic species might find that water very appealing, they would have absolutely no use whatsoever for any land based creatures.

I rather like the 12 Monkeys premise in a movie. It has some of the best elements of a good science fiction story. At different points of the story the viewer is forced to decide what is real and what is not. Who is telling the truth and why. And finally we are forced to the conclusion that we did some horrible thing to ourselves. We are the aliens.

The Movie Millennium shared several thematic traits with 12 Monkeys, such as the use of time travel and the notion that we did the future catastrophe to ourselves. The fact is that if something that seems far out, futuristic, and yet it looks like us-humanoid with bilateral symmetry-shares our DNA, and seems fascinated to an extraordinary degree with us, then it's us. Not methane breathing silicon squids from Uranus. Time travel is theoretically possible and humans are not wise and selfless enough to leave our own history alone. As was depicted in the movie The Sound of Thunder, we are more than likely to wipe out our own history by futzing around in our past trying to "fix" things.

An intriguing offshoot of the "We're the Aliens" genre is the notion that we are stuck in a simulation. Matrix is the most popular exemplar in this group. Unlike Matrix, in the real world, if the programmer did find out we were screwing up his program, he would simply stop the simulation. There are a number of scientists who have given the notion of simulated existence a great deal of thought. They have come to the conclusion that over the course of human history there will be a great many more simulations of reality than actual reality. Such an analysis leads to the inevitable conclusion that any given individual is more likely to be simulation than a real, independent entity. Fortunately, no one takes this seriously. The moral and ethical consequences would be horrendous. All the bit players in Matrix movies are massacred by the ones who think the whole thing is a simulation.

Learn more about this author, Michael Skinner.
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