After Earth hits theaters today, and the After Earth Science educational website is available for free anytime. // Sony
The summer apocalyptic action movie that comes out today —
After Earth — may be science fiction, but its premise leans toward the former rather than the latter of those two words.
This film, directed by M. Night Shyamalan and starring cutlass-wielding Will and Jaden Smith, begins 1,000 years after humans rocketed off planet Earth because air, water, tectonic activity, and temperatures (you know, pretty much everything) became dangerous or toxic. Humans built ark-like spaceships (reliably low on tectonic activity) and searched for a habitable planet. A millennium after that departure, the Smith duo and the other, less cutlass-capable humans live on a new planet. The father and son, however, leave that planet to go on a space mission that ends with a crash-landing on … wait for it … Earth, “the most dangerous place in the universe,” as a signal left on the planet for unwitting visitors reads.
And that’s where the action really starts. But as you can tell, there’s a considerable amount of backstory (actually, 300 written pages of it). And that backstory is predicated on how IRL humans in the IRL present are affecting planet Earth.
With that in mind, Sony Entertainment wanted to have an educational, scientific component to accompany the science fiction After Earth. That’s where biologist Joseph Levine comes in. Sony asked Levine — author, biologist, teacher, and outreacher — to create a website whose information “reminds us of our role in protecting Earth and challenges us to do our part to avoid the type of disastrous consequences seen in the film.” The site, called After Earth Science, is dense with images, illustrations, and videos about terrestrial changes and how they correlate with human actions. As Levine said, “These kind of graphics make the material much more intuitively obvious. We wanted to use data to inform people through accessible visuals.”
The site is fascinating (and colorful) to scroll through, but it also contains downloadable lesson plans and activities for teachers who would like to use the content in their classrooms. NASA and NOAA provided many of the graphics and data that make the pages so compelling.
I interviewed Levine about his involvement with After Earth, the science behind the movie, and the interplay between science and science fiction.
This still frame from a video of ocean currents’ motions represents the kind of stunning, data-driven imagery that dominates Levine’s educational website. // NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Service
How did you become involved with After Earth?
Parts of the film were shot in Costa Rica, some on the grounds of the La Selva Biological Station, which is operated by the Organization for Tropical Studies. It just so happens that I teach a course for high school science teachers at that biological station, and I’m also on the board, so the president of the organization put me in touch with Sony.
And now, because of your connection to an ecological organization and your knowledge of the scientific topics related to the film, you’ve created a repository of information for curious Internet-searchers and lesson plans for teachers. What are the scientific ideas you want those audiences to come away with?
There are a number of scientists who are looking at human-driven aspects of global change. The scientific jargon term is “anthropogenic global change.” There have been articles that try to identify which are the most important ones for different kinds of living systems, and one Science article highlighted a scientist’s perception of what the five major drivers of global change [climate change, land usage, nitrogen deposition, introduced species, and increased CO2] are. If you tried to make an exhaustive list, no one would read it. So that’s how I picked the aspects I emphasized on the website, and I point people in the direction of more information if they want it, like the website www.anthropocene.info. …
…The only way you can see the changes on Earth is if you have baseline data. One of the things necessary to understand the effects of change on a natural system is information about what the system was like before the change happened. That’s one of the things that institutions like the Organization for Tropical Studies provides — data that have been gathered over decades. You need real data to be able to understand what’s happening.
Do you think it’s possible for education and data to spur people to action?
It’s certainly a challenge in this information-driven, technologically distracting age. It’s hard to make one action that has a significant effect. This website was designed for teachers and for the youthful demographic, who might not necessarily go out looking for a website about global change. But when you first open the site, we have a video of Jaden Smith, and he looks at the camera and says, “I think After Earth could be a warning about what where we might be headed if we don’t start taking care of our home planet,” and students might pay attention to that.
How do you think science and science fiction interact?
For a science fiction movie to be useful and important, it doesn’t have to be a paragon of scientific verisimilitude. It’s a lot of what-ifs; it’s fiction; it’s fantasy. To me, what can make it valuable is the kind of interpersonal stuff — in the case of After Earth, father-son interaction — which is the core dynamic.
It does seem most effective to make the information secondary to the actual storyline, because what people are going to connect to are the characters, and the education or moral comes second.
Right, and there’s also this backstory to After Earth. The reason the characters ended up in this predicament is that humans somehow messed up planet Earth sufficiently that it was no longer fit for human habitation, and a bunch of people left to find somewhere else to live. And that’s what, as a biologist and science educator, I seized on for the core idea for the website. What do we know, what do we not know, and how do we make this stuff available and comprehensive and accessible to young people?
And science fiction interested you as a child, and now you’re a scientist. Maybe a sci-fi movie will cause younger people to seek out scientific information, like the After Earth Science website?
A lot of the science fiction that I grew up with was written with the intent of getting people to think about things that hadn’t happened yet. Isaac Asmivo’s I Robot series — not the movie, but the books — immediately comes to mind. Asimov started thinking seriously about what would happen if the advancing capabilities of artificial intelligence and circuitry in general were extrapolated into the indefinite future. He was one of a generation of early science-fiction writers who tried to show what the course of then-current technology might lead to.
And After Earth is science fiction along those same lines.
Will Smith and M. Night Shyamalan chose not just an apocalypse but an eco-apocalypse. And that to me is an interesting choice. Somewhere between them, they came up with the idea that the reason the characters are out in space is that humans made the planet uninhabitable. And that’s a distinct possibility.
Living away from Earth — in space or on other planets — also is becoming a more distinct possibility than in the past.
Very serious people are investing a lot of money and effort into making science fiction a reality.
Sites to check out:
A “Dave’s Universe” blog post about After Earth’s X-Prize contest: http://cs.astronomy.com/asy/b/daves-universe/archive/2013/04/25/sony-pictures-and-xprize-launch-after-earth-challenge.aspx
The lesson plans: http://www.lifeafterearthscience.com/
The movie: http://www.afterearth.com/site/
More global change info and graphics: Anthropocene.info
The Organization for Tropical Studies: http://www.ots.ac.cr/