Imagine this: you are freezing to death in an ice cave on a planet that is 4 years of space travel away from Earth. From the ice cave emerge life-sized hairy cockroaches. What would you do? And what would you do if you knew you were reprinted? “I hope they’ll be quick about it,” says the voiceover accompanying the opening images of Mickey 17.
The resurrection of man
In Mickey 17, the protagonist, Mickey, is printed over and over again by a large 3D tissue printer, while his memories are loaded via a swim cap with electrodes. Those memories are regularly backed up and had been retrieved before the expedition using a retrieval-inducing drug. Mickey is an expendable, a disposable human being. He is employed for dangerous missions and scientific research. And when he dies, he is reprinted in the last backed-up state. He had signed up for the last space expedition and really needed to go. He signed up to be something no one else wanted to be.
But how realistic is it to reprint a human being? Well, less far-fetched than it seems. Already in 2019, the first heart was printed from human cells and the technical developments have progressed from there. While, combining these techniques to print a human being is a lot more complicated, but as more organs can be printed, it is not entirely inconceivable.
On the other hand, uploading memories, personality and language skills is a lot more complicated than that. Many of our long-term memories are not stored at one place in your brain, but throughout the entire brain. Researchers are trying to read the brain using artificial intelligence, but to restore it in such detail is a long way off. How those memories can be put back into a fresh brain is even more complicated, because you’d have to restore all these individual connections.
So experiences may differ, also in the movie. The different reprinted Mickeys turn out to have somewhat varying personalities. Mickey 17 is a pitiable and lovable pushover, but Mickey 18 turns out to be a true bulldog who gets what he wants. There’s a scientific basis for this: in genetics, even with an identical genetic code, as in identical twins, the outcomes are not identical, because biology is full of fluctuations and noise and because a different environment leads to different outcomes, called a gene-by-environment interaction.
Interlude: our relationship to death
What does death still mean when you are printed over and over again? The follow-up discussion with former Denker des Vaderlands, (the national philosopher) Marli Huijer covers our relationship to death and dying. Huijer introduces the concept of the rectangular life. We would like a life that is happy from beginning to end, after which it ends in one fell swoop. We eliminated all acute suffering in our society, after which only chronic suffering remains, according to Huijer. The movie also seems to reflect this rectangular vision: Mickey shows no sign of aging in 4 years of space travel. This rectangular vision brings with it a fear of death, Huijer says.
The way to learn to deal with death is to talk about it and take it out of the taboo. Experiencing a good, peaceful death can also help tremendously. In the film, Mickey has a hard time dealing with it. “How does it feel to die?”, he is regularly asked, to which he lashes out, or confesses at a later time he doesn’t like it at all.
Communication between species
Back to the opening scene. What do you do when that big cockroach turns out not to eat you, but drags you out again? Back out into the cold, into freedom. Suddenly the alien creatures turn out to not be vicious. They leave you alone and show motherly affection to their young. “I’m still good meat,” you tell them. How do you then explain that to your boss who wants to exterminate all cockroaches?
Translation turns out to be the key. Mickey is sent back to them with a device that converts the low grunts into English. Humans long thought they were the only ones with complex language. However, recent research tells us that whale song shares some of the complex cultural patterns of recombination and dispersal through contact between different groups (https://doi.org/10.1038/35046199 , https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2020.0313 ). Also, the sounds in the song follows a similar frequency distribution found in human language: the Zipfian distribution. A Zipfian distribution indicates that a few words occur very often, and then it declines rapidly.
However, the meaning of whale song is still completely unclear to scientists. The speed and small amount of data they use in film is a bit unrealistic. Three sounds and the lead rogue scientist knows enough. A day later the translator is there. It’s great story-telling, but it’s a long way from where we are today with science. But who knows what the world will look like in five years time. Perhaps artificial general intelligence can help.
Exposing the Muskian view of science
Ultimately, Mickey 17 is political satire about the situation in America. There are remarkable parallels with Musk’s vision of science: “reading” the brain (Neuralink), continuing human civilization on another planet (SpaceX), translation using AI (Grok). The leader of the expedition, Marshall, is a comic portrayal of a Trumpian leader. He is more interested in gooey entertainment than real leadership, with a fan base that views him as the messiah. Marshall’s allegations by some of the characters about propagating the pure white human race seem to match some of Musk’s remarks about eugenics. And even in the film, religion is a veneer of entertainment, not the embodiment of deeper religious values. Despite appearing futuristic, in many ways this is a reversal to a nineteenth-century view of science, entangled with that era’s capitalism, with all the dark sides that come with it. Bong Joon Ho wants to expose it, make fun of it and show us a different way.
The movie does not end with Musk’s view of science. At the pivotal moment, much of the crew rebels. The cockroaches are not exterminated, although it was close, and the 3D printer is eventually blown up by Mickey, so that Mickey 17 becomes just Mickey again. Life is not expendable after all.
This piece was edited by Carmen Ramoser.
