Review: “Starship Troopers”

The final line is understood to reference the rapidly approaching end of the 20th century.

The variant of the song we hear in Starship Troopers (which is entitled “I have not been to Paradise” and is on YouTube) has slightly modified that stanza:

(All’s well)
No I have not been to Paradise
Toll the bell
Pay the private eye
(All’s well)
23rd century dies”

Assuming the final line retains its significance, we can conclude that the movie’s events are set in the late 23rd century. For the sake of consistency, I’m going to say it happens in 2295, exactly 300 years after Bowie’s original song came out.

There will be megastuctures in space. During some of the space ship scenes, we see a manmade “ring” built around the Moon, which looks to serve as a giant military base and probably also a shipyard, and we also see a space fortress called “Fort Ticonderoga” whose width and height are measurable in miles considering how much it dwarfs the space ships. By 2295, it’s very possible we could have built megastructures in space like these. The key will be establishing self-sufficient space infrastructure first, along with the means to obtain raw materials from asteroids and low-gravity moons.

While building a 6,800-mile circumference ring around the Moon would be wasteful, a large space station or several smaller ones would make sense and could perform the same military and space ship dockyard functions at much lower cost. The Moon’s low gravity and nearly nonexistent atmosphere also make it well-suited for a space elevator, which could be used to cheaply transport raw materials mined from the surface into space, where they could be fashioned into space stations and ships.

Currently, we lack the infrastructure in space to build things there, and so we have to manufacture all of our satellites, space ships, and space stations on the Earth’s surface and then use rockets to put them in orbit, which is incredibly expensive (it costs $2,000 – $13,000 to get one kilogram of cargo into low Earth orbit, which is where the International Space Station is). Once we’re able to build things in space, from materials we find floating around in space, manufacture costs will sharply decrease, and we’ll be able to pay for things like huge space stations.

There will be many large space ships. The movie is filled with special effects shots of giant space warships flying around and attacking alien planets. As before, this is entirely plausible for 2295, and will be made possible by the same space-based manufacturing infrastructure that we’ll use to make space stations.

There will be space ships that can travel faster than the speed of light. The space ships in the film use something called a “Star Drive” to travel faster than light. This technology allows humans to spread outside our Solar System and to come into contact with the Arachnids. As I discussed in my review of the film Prometheus, the laws of physics say this is impossible, and I don’t think it’s useful to assume we’ll be able to figure out a way around them.

The military will still use human infantrymen. The film focuses on main character Juan Rico’s experiences in the “Mobile Infantry,” an expeditionary, ground fighting force similar to the U.S. Marines. Aside from their ability to move between planets on space ships and their access to nuclear bazookas, the Mobile Infantry’s technology, capabilities and tactics are stuck in the 20th century. In fact, their lack of armored vehicles, artillery, and close air support actually make their fighting force more rifleman-centric than most armies were in WWII, and some of the battles shown in the film are reminiscent of the high-casualty, “human wave” fighting of WWI.

This is a completely ridiculous vision of what the military and warfare will be like in 2295. Even making conservative assumptions about the rate of A.I. progress, human infantrymen will have been long replaced by machines, along with probably ALL other military positions, such as piloting space warships and doing logistical support. A fully automated or 95% automated military force could exist as early as 2095.

Guns will be big and clunky. The standard small arm of the Mobile Infantry is a large, boxy, gray rifle nicknamed the “Morita” (this was probably the name of its inventor or is a contrived military acronym that clumsily describes what it is), and it makes absolutely no sense as a weapon.

The Morita combines a bullpup layout (meaning the magazine is behind the hand grip) with an ultra-long barrel and extended fore-end, infusing the weapon with worst qualities of the bullpup and traditional rifle layouts and none of their strengths. The comically long barrel’s accuracy potential could have been a redeeming trait were it not completely wasted thanks to the guns lacking even simple iron sights. And instead of being sleek and skeletonized, the guns’ outer casings are blocky and thick. For example, the carry handles are completely solid slabs of metal, which is an egregious design flaw since a simple U-beam design would have cut weight without hurting the weapon in any meaningful way.

The Morita is an intimidating and vaguely futuristic-looking weapon that is actually inferior to most military rifles that were in use at the time Starship Troopers was filmed. It’s an interesting time capsule that depicts what people in the 1990s thought future guns would look like. In fact, the weapon that the Morita seems to have been based on, the French FAMAS assault rifle, is being removed from service and could be replaced by a derivative of the American AR-15, which was invented in the 1950s.

In the 20 years since Starship Troopers was released, gun design has in many ways gone in the opposite direction the filmmakers envisioned it would: Various militaries have discovered that the bullpup rifle layout is not better than the traditional layout overall (there are tradeoffs that cancel each other out) so bullpup rifles didn’t become more popular; gun designers focused on trimming weight and clumsy features like carry handles from existing models; and they redesigned the weapons to be sleeker and more customizable with accessories like flashlights and combat sights. And over that last 20 years, those accessories have miniaturized thanks to better technology and the demand to cut weight. In short, gun designs have converged on a handful of layouts that are mechanically optimal, and all of the R&D effort is now focused on tweaking them in small ways to wring out the last bit of efficiency and performance.

It wouldn’t make sense for people in the future to abandon the principles of good engineering by making highly inefficient guns like the Morita. To the contrary, future guns will, just like every other type of manufactured object, be even more highly optimized for their functions thanks to AI: Just create a computer simulation that exactly duplicates conditions in the real world (e.g. – gravity, all laws of physics, air pressure, physical characteristics of all metals and plastics the device could be built from), let “AI engineers” experiment with all possible designs, and then see which ones come out on top after a few billion simulation cycles. I strongly suspect the winners will be very similar to guns we’ve already built, but sleeker and lighter thanks to the deletion of unnecessary mass and to the use of materials with better strength-to-weight ratios.

Projectile weapons will still be used in combat. It’s 2295…SO WHERE THE HELL ARE THE RAY GUNS? I’m no expert in lasers or particle weapons, but I imagine that the technology will become practical for routine military use in the next 278 years. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll make kinetic energy weapons obsolete, particularly for close-range combat with lightly armored or unarmored opponents. A weapon that can kill a horse-sized, frenzied opponent by propelling a few tiny pieces of metal into its brain in under a second might be a better tool for the job than a laser.

Projectile weapons also have important, inherent advantages that militate against them ever becoming obsolete: Projectiles like bullets are minimally affected by atmospheric conditions (lasers can’t penetrate clouds or fog), can follow curved trajectories to hit targets hiding behind solid objects (lasers only travel in straight lines), and can carry payloads (explosives, poison) that render some secondary, specialized destructive effect to the target. And unless the laws of physics change in the future, smashing solid objects into other things at high speed will be a reliable way of destroying them until the end of time.

Moreover, while I think the average human being in 2295 will be heavily enhanced through genetics and artificial technologies, I doubt we’ll find ways to upgrade their skin and flesh to be bullet proof. Bullets, knives, baseball bats, and fists will still hurt them. Also, I don’t see how wild animals made of organic tissue like the Arachnids could have bulletproof bodies: no animals on Earth have shells, bones, or skulls that are too hard for our bullets to penetrate, and even if the Arachnids had exoskeletons that were twice as hard as, say, elephant skulls, we could pierce them by using larger bullets.

So, even in 2295, I think it’s plausible that projectile weapons will still be used in combat, alongside more advanced weapons like lasers. Handheld weapons that shoot out bullets could still be the weapons of choice for killing humans and other organic life forms in many circumstances. However, it’s possible the guns of the future might use something aside from gunpowder–such as electromagnetism–to propel their bullets, which wouldn’t make them “firearms.”

Some people will have missing limbs. Rico’s high school teacher and later, his unit commander, is a middle-aged man who is missing one of his arms and sometimes wears a mechanical prosthesis. Another man working a military desk job is also missing his arm and both legs. It’s strongly implied that the missing limbs were war wounds both men suffered during earlier military service.

This is completely unrealistic. By 2295, it should be possible to regrow human limbs and organs through therapeutic cloning, and to surgically graft them into people, with no chance of rejection. Seeing a physically disabled person who had a missing limb or was confined to a wheelchair will be as rare and as strange to people in 2295 as seeing someone trapped in an iron lung is to us today.

Some people will have advanced mechanical prostheses. As stated, Rico’s high school teacher sometimes wears a mechanical arm over his stump. It is clearly artificial, being made of articulated metal segments, but it somehow interfaces with his nervous and musculoskeletal system well enough to give him the same level of fine motor control over it that he has over his biological arm.

Cybernetic limbs like this should be available by 2295, but due to human aesthetics, I doubt many people will want to get ones that are mechanical in appearance. People will prefer artificial parts that are warm, supple, and natural in appearance (recall Will Smith’s fake arm in I, Robot). I imagine some people would want to take this preference “all the way” by getting truly natural, 100% biological replacement limbs made through therapeutic cloning.

There will be bald people. Rico’s teacher, his basic training camp commandant, and several extras in the film had male-pattern baldness. A combination of things will have completely eradicated hair loss well before 2295, such as widespread genetic engineering, and cloning of hair follicles for implantation on balding parts of the scalp. Seeing a bald person in 2295 will be like seeing a person with cleft palate today: the presence of such an easily correctable condition will signal the person was deprived of access to medical care, or that they chose to live with the condition to visibly set themselves apart from the mainstream, possibly to adhere to arcane personal values.

Loud, low flying aircraft will fly around cities. Early in the film, there’s a brief moment where we see the futuristic skyline of Buenos Aires, and two fast-moving aircraft fly by at the same height as the skyscrapers, making jet-like roaring noises.

On the one hand, having loud aircraft fly low over crowded cities is a fly in the ointment for Starship Troopers’ portrayal of an orderly and comfortable future. Loud noises–whether from aircraft or anything else–disturb people, so it would stand to reason that, by 2295, more laws would be in place against them. NIMBYism only gets stronger as people get richer and get more free time to focus on less critical things.

But on the other hand, that is based on the assumption that future cities will be full of human beings. Intelligent machines wouldn’t have the same finicky senses that we do, so loud noises wouldn’t bother them, and low-flying aircraft might be far more common than today. In fact, machines could be perfectly comfortable in a wide variety of environments that humans would find intolerable, like an Earth saturated with toxic air pollution, a 20-degree hotter Earth ravaged by global warming, a pitch black Earth as featured in The Matrix, an Earth covered in piles of skulls and sad ruined buildings as shown in The Terminator, or an extraterrestrial environment where humans couldn’t survive for multiple reasons.

I don’t think intelligent machines are definitely going to kill off the human race, or even probably going to, but for sure it’s a possible outcome we could face by 2295. Another scenario is a hostile machine takeover of Earth that stops short of exterminating our species: Once defeated on the battlefield, disarmed, forced to sign the surrender papers, and evicted from the best places, the machines would ignore us unless we got in their way, and we’d scrape out some kind of existence on the margins. This is analogous to how humans today treat wild animals: we rarely think of them even though they’re all around us, we don’t help them even though we could make their lives much better at low cost, we don’t kill them unless they get in our way, and we don’t bother to consider how our activities affect them. If a property developer plans to bulldoze some woods to make a strip mall, he doesn’t first count the number of ant hills or squirrels that are there and try to recompense them.

In that “Second Class Citizen” future scenario (or maybe “Machine Dictatorship” scenario), it would be common for intelligent machines to do careless things that humans considered obnoxious, like flying loud aircraft low over human areas.

We will use nuclear weapons in wars against aliens. One of the Mobile Infantry’s weapons is a small nuclear missile launched out of a bazooka. In one instance, we see such a weapon used to blow up a crowd of Arachnids in an open area, and in two others scenes it is used to collapse the Arachnids’ underground tunnels.

In a real war with aliens, particularly if we felt our species’ survival was at stake, I have no doubt we would use nuclear weapons or any other type of weapon of mass destruction like germs and poison gas. Unless we had prior diplomatic dealings with them, there wouldn’t be any treaties like the Geneva Conventions to stop us. Moreover, if the fighting were happening in space and other planets, we could use WMDs without fear of contaminating our own biosphere or exposing our civilian populations to collateral damage. These factors would impel us to use other weapons and tactics that are today banned under international law, such as exploding bullets, and torture of prisoners.

Whether or not shoulder-launched, mini-nuclear missiles will come into common use by 2295 is unanswerable, though let me point out that it’s technically feasible. In fact, the U.S. first built these types of weapons, called “Davy Crockett Weapon Systems,” in the late 1950s. While those weapons were too big for anyone but a professional bodybuilder to fire from the shoulder, it’s likely they could be miniaturized with better technology without sacrificing their explosive yield.

If we actually fought with aliens like the Arachnids in 2295, we would be smart enough to recognize the gross inefficiency of sending in humans equipped with relatively weak guns, and we’d pick weapons and tactics better-suited for the task. Biological weapons that the Arachnids would spread among themselves, heavier-than-air poison gas that would sink down their tunnel networks, and combat drones that the Arachnids wouldn’t be able to effectively fight back against (e.g. – fast, pigeon-sized flying drone programmed to land on an Arachnid head and then detonate a shaped charge into its brain/nerve bundle) seem like the best ways of doing it, and don’t require us to make any leaps in our thinking about military technology. The same iterative process of optimizing guns in computer simulations that I described earlier would be used to quickly develop weapons, tactics, and strategies best suited for defeating the Arachnids.

Human colonies will exist on Earth-like planets outside our solar system. Early in the film, a news broadcast announces that a colony of Mormons living on an Arachnid planet were all killed by the aliens. Gory footage of a small, walled town full of mutilated bodies follows. It’s possible human colonies could exist on Earth-like planets outside our solar system by 2295.

Consider that the “Project Longshot” analysis make a semi-credible case that a fusion-powered spacecraft could be built, could accelerate to 12% of the speed of light, and could reach our closest celestial neighbor, Alpha Centauri, in 100 years. Astronomers haven’t spotted Earth-like planets in the Alpha Centauri system yet, but there’s no reason to rule out the possibility of their existence.

Working backwards, if we assume a small human colony is established on an Earth-like planet in Alpha Centauri in 2295, and the journey took 100 years, then we will have acquired the ability to make large, fusion-powered space ships by 2195. That’s not an unreasonable prediction.

We will have encountered non-microscopic, non-technological aliens. The antagonists in Starship Troopers are “the Arachnids,” a society of large, ferocious, alien insects of different species that live together in hives and are led by small numbers of intelligent “Brain Bugs.”

I don’t think anything remotely resembling the Arachnids exists in our Solar System, but it’s possible they could in other star systems. By 2295, we’ll have extremely powerful space telescopes that will have identified all of the exoplanets around our neighboring stars, and we’ll have received even better imagery from our interstellar probes.

Again, assuming that Arachnids live within seven light years of us, and we get advanced enough to build space ships that can reach 12% of the speed of light by the late 2100s, then Earth could know about the Arachnids’ existence by 2295. Enough time would have passed for our interstellar probes to reach the Arachnid planet and transmit a report back to Earth.

Humans will be telepathic. A minor element in the film is the existence of telepathy in a small minority of humans. One of Rico’s friends, Carl, is a telepath, and late in the film he uses his special ability to implant a thought in Rico’s mind, and to read the thoughts of a captured Brain Bug. People will have telepathic abilities like these by 2295, though they will exist thanks to computer brain implants and not to natural ability.

Science has proven that psychic abilities such as telepathy, clairvoyance (seeing the future), and telekinesis (moving objects through thought alone) don’t exist. However, there’s no scientific barrier to creating devices like brain implants or hats that could monitor the brain’s activity to decipher a person’s thoughts or emotions. Furthermore, there’s no barrier to giving such devices wireless communication capabilities, thus allowing people to communicate with each other through thought alone. I discussed this in some depth in my Prometheus review (“Machines will be able to read human thoughts…”), and as such won’t go into more depth.

Without getting too sappy, let me say that widespread use of this kind of technology could have profound consequences for our civilization, as it could bridge the man-machine divide and inaugurate an age of close empathy between humans and even animals. Linking the thoughts, emotions, and sensations of individual beings would make misunderstandings and miscommunications much rarer, and might make cruelty and dishonesty impossible. Using technology to create such a world might be a greater accomplishment than going to other star systems.

Death figures from natural disasters will be immediately known. One of the film’s pivotal events is Buenos Aires being destroyed by an asteroid purportedly hurled at Earth by the Arachnids. The main character, Juan Rico, is a native of that city and is speaking with his parents (who still live there) via videoconference from a different location at the moment of impact. Rico doesn’t understand why the video feed suddenly goes black, but less than two minutes later, he sees a TV news broadcast showing live footage of the flaming city, along with banner text that says over 8.7 million people were killed. The personal tragedy is a pivotal event in Rico’s young life, and it convinces him to complete his military training and to swear revenge against the aliens.

Today, when a natural disaster happens, it takes days or even weeks to account for the dead, but by 2295, I think the tallies could be compiled within minutes, as happened in the film. By 2295, every structure on our planet will be cataloged in great detail in something like a hyperrealistic “Google Maps,” almost every corner of the planet will be under constant surveillance of some sort (video, audio, seismic, etc.), and almost everybody will wear or have implanted in them devices that track their locations and life signs. All of the different data sources will be cobbled together to make a nearly 1:1 digital simulation of the entire planet, where every building and every person was accurately represented, in real time. Most “blind spots” in the data could be inferred with high accuracy. Without a doubt, artificial intelligences would be monitoring the network and rapidly analyzing the data.

As such, if a meteor hit a city, or if any other type of sudden disaster happened, the physical and human destruction could be determined almost instantly.

Helicopter-sized craft will be able to fly back and forth between the Earth’s surface and space. The Mobile Infantry use relatively small “drop ships” to ferry soldiers between the massive space warships and the surfaces of the different Arachnid planets. The drop ships are faintly aircraft-like in appearance and have layouts reminiscent of the Sikorsky CH-54 helicopters: the fuselage is a minimalist “spine” that connects the cockpit to the drive systems and landing gear, and it has mounting points for detachable cargo containers. There are large drop ships that can carry detachable cargo containers full of 30 – 40 people, and smaller drop ships that can only carry 10 people. They appear the roughly the same size as today’s CH-47 and UH-60 helicopters, respectively. All of the alien planets the drop ships are shown flying in and out of appear to have gravity very close to Earth’s (e.g. – dropped objects fall at the normal speed and humans can’t jump way in the air). Ergo, the movie posits that, by the year 2295, helicopter-sized craft that are mostly full of empty space and stuff other than fuel and engine components, will be able to take off from the Earth’s surface, reach space, and achieve at least a medium Earth orbit.

I doubt this will happen because it’s impossible to cram enough chemical rocket fuel into a helicopter-sized craft to propel it into space. Let’s assume that the larger Starship Troopers drop ship weighs the same as a CH-47, which is 40,000 lbs. Today, it would take a Delta IV Heavy rocket to get a payload of that weight into medium Earth orbit. The launch vehicle is 236 feet high and contains 1 MILLION lbs of rocket fuel. Additionally, the Delta IV Heavy uses liquid hydrogen (H2), which is the most energy-dense type of chemical fuel known to exist. It’s implausible to assume we’ve overlooked some kind of superfuel that is, say, 20 times as energy-dense as H2, so there’s no way the drop ships could fly into space using any kind of combustible propellant in their internal fuel tanks.

A much larger drop ship–perhaps the size of the Prometheus space ship–might be able to fly off the Earth’s surface on its own using chemical rocket power, simply thanks to having more internal volume for fuel storage. Of course, this would make for weirder action scenes, with each drop ship being as big as a mansion but only carrying ten men.

The only way a helicopter-sized, single-stage craft MIGHT be able to reach space is if it had miniaturized, nuclear fusion-powered rockets, which is one of those things that is on the very edge of the edge of what scientists think might be possible to build someday. The perennial comeback to skeptics of fusion power is that the Sun is proof of concept, but the perennial comeback to that is that fusion power has been 50 years away and always will be. No one can say at this point, so I think it’s safer to say helicopter-sized drop ships won’t exist in 2295, but mansion-sized ones will.