The Cosmic Bubble

Here’s a sci-fi movie idea that I think would be pretty sweet. If any filmmakers are reading this, please create this movie and I’ll take a modest 50% of the revenue. (That’s how this works, right?)

This one’s sort of like The Truman Show meets The Matrix meets Contact.

I got the idea from a trailer I just saw for the movie Gravity, which looks pretty cool. In the trailer, an astronaut is hurled from a malfunctioning spacecraft and shown careening off into space. It’s a pretty horrifying prospect, obviously.

Now here’s the idea: take a scenario sort of like that–an astronaut floating out uncontrollably, farther and farther from Earth–and then imagine that suddenly she reaches this boundary, like a portal of sorts. She goes through, and suddenly everything’s different. She’s in a completely different world now. Some alien scientists snatch her up and take her to a facility right away.

Clearly, she has questions. Through some sci-fi wizardry, the aliens are able to communicate with her (you know, like in Contact: You downloaded my thoughts?); so she asks them what happened.

The aliens explain that the universe is actually nothing like we think. There is a bubble around our world that creates a powerful illusion, which is responsible for all of our false knowledge about the cosmos. What our telescopes see is a projection cast by this bubble. When we send signals out, the bubble intercepts them and sends back signals that make us think that there are stars, galaxies, etc. out there; but there aren’t. Even our physical objects–like the Mars rovers, or the Voyager space probes–are absorbed by the bubble, which somehow analyzes them and then sends down signals to make us think they’re functioning as designed.

So when we see pictures of “Mars” taken by Curiosity, for example, those pictures aren’t real. Curiosity was consumed by the bubble, which now periodically beams data down to NASA in accordance with what the scientists at NASA expect to see from the rover’s photography equipment. Similarly, Voyager–which we believe is nearing the edge of the solar system–actually vanished long ago; and again the data that we think we’re receiving from its measuring equipment is actually a product of the bubble’s illusory systems.

Right. So, clearly this undermines basically everything we think we know about the universe. Anyway, that’s the starting premise. I think there are many ways the story could go from there; here’s one possibility.

Naturally the astronaut (I will call her Samus) has more questions. Who built this? is the big one. The aliens claim that they built it–that they built the entire Earth, in fact. Samus asks why the bubble. They explain that it was a sort of philosophical research project: they wanted to see if it could be done, to satisfy their own curiosity about their world.

It turns out that this alien race developed a lot like us: as they were first developing intelligence, they did not understand much of the universe. So they evolved various mystical beliefs about powerful gods, superior beings who must have created them and designed everything. Then over time as their species advanced more and more technologically, there were those among them who came to question these early beliefs. They wondered if there were any part of the universe that is “unknowable”–as they originally believed, with their gods and religions–or if it could all eventually be understood.

But unlike us, the aliens deeply questioned their own perception. They realized that all of their scientific progress was predicated on their observations being an accurate reflection of reality, which they did not want to take for granted (but we most certainly do). When they had become sufficiently advanced that they could conceivably build an entire world and wrap it so that its people would be forever subject to an illusion, they did it. And here we are.

Again Samus asks why. The aliens explain that this answers the question for them: the universe is unknowable. Because they were able to do this to us, it means that their world could be in a bubble as well. They don’t know if their universe is real–if they can trust their measurements, if their probes really ever reach their destinations, etc.–or if there are superior beings more advanced than they, who could be observing this very conversation right now.

Samus points out that she discovered these aliens by herself reaching the edge of the bubble. If these aliens are so advanced, why not try traveling to the edge of their bubble, to see if there is one? The scientists agree that it’s worth trying; in fact, they have been trying it for a very long time. The facility where they are currently all standing is inside a craft that is moving at nearly the speed of light away from their home world. (Incidentally, I think it would be cool if in this world it turns out the “universe” is basically a giant ocean: a seemingly endless expanse of some sort of fluid substance rather than a vacuum interspersed with occasional clusters of galaxies, stars, and planets. Or it could be something entirely different. I would just want it to be nothing like what we currently think it is, in terms of “space” and so forth–that’s sort of the whole point.)

Of course this is all rather melancholy for the aliens. They don’t know if their world is real, but they doubt it since they made our world, and our world isn’t real. But even if it isn’t, they suspect they may not be able to figure that out. It could be that this hypothetically more advanced race who created them made something much more sophisticated than their bubble; it could be this grand illusion that has no boundary, from which they can never escape. And so they are searching without much hope that they’ll ever find anything.

To me, the best part is this. Finally, the scientists ask Samus to reflect on what’s happening right now, at this very moment. She is seeing the aliens as these sort of humanoid creatures; but that is not their true form. They explain that she is in her own personal bubble right now; what her eyes see is light that is being transmitted by the bubble, not reflected off of their actual bodies. The room itself is nothing like what she thinks she sees around her. The aliens have placed her in this environment to make her feel safe (yeah, I know I’m sort of copying Contact here; but it’s a good idea so I’m using it), which demonstrates that the same revelation about our observations being suspect on the universal scale applies to our individual perception as well.

This too troubles the aliens, because they realize that since they are able to do this to Samus, a higher species might be doing it to them. The lead scientist then gestures to his colleagues and admits that he doesn’t know whether they’re real or just his imagination. He doesn’t even know if Samus is real, or if the whole story of his species creating humanity etc. was also an illusion.

This film would hypothetically leave the audience questioning every single detail of the story. I would get quite a kick out of that. So I guess it’s sort of The Truman Show meets The Matrix meets Contact meets Inception.

Oh yeah, and I definitely don’t think The Cosmic Bubble is a good title for a movie. It’s just like a code name or something.