Planet of the Apes and Philosophy (16 page)

We should distinguish among human-to-human relations, within-species relations in other species, and relations between humans and non-humans. We can well recognize that a relation has value even if we do not personally take part in it, and may wish to preserve it. For instance, when Taylor realizes his
friend has been lobotomized, he shouts, “You cut up his head, you bloody baboon!” and rushes Dr. Zaius in anger. Zira looks at this scene, saddened and sorry for Taylor, rather than worried for the ape he will try in vain to attack. She understands the great value of the private relation Taylor had with his friend and the fairness of his reaction. In such cases, apes and humans recognize the moral significance of relationships.

We can also realize this importance impartially, which should disarm the anti-speciesist worry about arbitrariness. Dr. Zira has done experimental brain surgery on humans, and is not judgmental of another society where apes are the ones experimented on. The problem remains that Zira or other impartial judges are still mistaken about what is acceptable to do to others, even if we're willing to do it to ourselves if we were placed in the other's situation.

As Charlton Heston tells his fellow astronauts when they paddle out of the sinking spaceship, “we're here to stay.” There is no running away from this planet, no other community to join. Confronted with other species and limited resources (and other species are part of these resources) how should we act?

In all of the movies in the series, there are characters who are sympathetic to members of the dominated group—Zira and Cornelius in the two first movies, Stephanie and Lewis in the third, MacDonald in the fourth, Caesar in the final one. This is the moral stance that we must adopt to overcome the immoral type of speciesism. What conditions are necessary to acquire such a concern for other species?

These considerate characters acting as moral models are scientists trained to think objectively and humane, compassionate people. Caesar says: “MacDonald, I believe that when you grow to truly know and trust a person, you cannot help but like him. When we grow to know and trust your people, we will be equals until the end of time.” This tells us that we need a certain level of security to afford empathy, compassion, or genuine concern. At the same time, we cannot give all moral concern to our own species and none to others.

In
Beneath the Planet of the Apes
, Dr. Zaius refuses to let humans live because they bring only death. Similarly, in the
third installment,
Escape from the Planet of the Apes
, Hasslein, the president's science advisor, is worried that intelligent apes, given their tendency to brutality, will eventually enslave humans. It is out of solidarity for their respective groups and the relations they have with them that they need to eliminate a group of beings that has become a threat, regardless of the gravity of this threat. This utter disregard for the interests of other species will antagonize the two groups further, rather than reconcile them. It is morality's task to distinguish when, and to what extent, our relationships require that we give (only a partial and justified) priority to our own species, and when we are merely giving priority to our own species out of an arbitrary preference for “our own” and a callous indifference to others.

The
Planet of the Apes
franchise is, but for the last installment,
Battle for the Planet of the Apes
, very bleak. These films reflect two deep fears simmering in the American psyche at the time of their production. First, the fear of a great nuclear catastrophe that would end it all, wipe out all life on the planet or create mutants (a key theme of
Beneath the Planet of the Apes
). Second, the fear of descendants of slaves uniting and rising against the white oppressors (a key theme in
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes
).

It displays the tragedy of man's inability to react before it's too late to avoid ethnic wars or destroy the world and begs the question of whether men are so rotten—mainly because of their penchant for destroying other beings—that they ought to be wiped out. The movies show us humans and apes destroying one another but, thanks to time travel, bring us back to a hopeful but insecure future that looks a lot like the conflict-ridden world in which we now live. Read as a cautionary tale, they warn us we must learn to strike a proper balance between our various affiliations, loyalties, and relationships with other humans and non-humans if we are to survive.

The young apes caricaturing the “flower power” youth in
Beneath the Planet of the Apes
, sitting on the road and chanting “We want peace and freedom, not war” may have it right, no matter how unrealistic cynics may deem them to be. No true morality can come about between distrustful enemies analyzing each other objectively.

Equality doesn't have to do with strangers' respective capacities. It's a matter of recognition of the other person's
intrinsic worth, rather than of some evaluation of their objective value from the standpoint of the universe. It is a matter of establishing bonds of trust and learning the ways in which we are alike. When these bonds are established, we are equals, not in the sense of possessing the same color, or height, or wisdom, or whatever, but in the sense that we are fundamentally concerned with other beings sharing our fate (or a similar fate) and our planet. We are nonetheless relational beings, capable of both a broad, universal, and a narrower, individualized concern. Such a concern may encompass various relationships which sometimes demand preferential treatment for members of our own species.

D
AVID
L. M
ORGAN

T
he
Planet of the Apes
films are not time-travel movies, they are just movies in which people (and apes) travel through time. The original 1968
Planet of the Apes
film, and its 1970 successor
Beneath the Planet of the Apes
rely on future-directed time travel of a sort that is entirely permissible within the confines of physics, although the mechanisms suggested in the movies are at times rather vague.

The mere fact of time travel is simply a necessary plot element that sets up the situations explored in the series. In the first movie, as Taylor is recording his final log entry before hibernation, he explains that he and his crew have been in space for six months, “by our time that is. According to Dr. Hasslein's theory of time in a vehicle traveling nearly the speed of light, the Earth has aged nearly seven hundred years since we left it.”

In
Beneath the Planet of the Apes
, future-directed time travel comes with another explanation—Brent speculates that his ship must have “passed through a Hasslein curve—a bend in time.” Of course no such made-up science is necessary to explain this sort of travel into the future. And no new theories, Hasslein's or otherwise, are necessary beyond Albert Einstein's 1905 Special Theory of Relativity.

While Einstein's special theory of relativity does not exactly permit time travel in the sense of “skipping” from the present
time to some future time, it does allow for an effect that accomplishes something similar. According to modern relativity, observers moving relative to one another do not experience time in the same way. If you are moving though space very fast—say at ninety percent of the speed of light—time will pass more slowly for you compared to a stationary observer. This allows the crew of an interstellar spacecraft to take a trip that lasts for ten years as measured by those left behind on their home planet, but only eight years as measured aboard the spacecraft. Or five years. Or one year. Or one month! There is no limit to how short the time experienced by the ship's crew can be as the ship goes faster and faster—ninety percent, ninety-nine percent, 99.999 percent of the speed of light.

We can deduce something from Taylor's description of time aboard his ship from the numbers he cites in his log entry. He claims that six months of time have gone by aboard the ship while the earth has aged nearly seven hundred years. Unless Dr. Hasslein has significantly modified Einstein's theory of relativity, we can conclude that, based on the implied time dilation factor of around 1,400, Taylor's ship is traveling at around 99.99997 percent of the speed of light.

This sort of time-travel is a well-established fact of nature. Unstable particles created by cosmic rays at the top of Earth's atmosphere live longer when they are hurtling towards the ground than when they are sitting relatively still in the lab. Short-lived particles produced in high-energy particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider experience this relativistic time dilation in precise agreement with the predictions of Einstein's theory.

Gravity can have a similar effect on time. Time flows more slowly for observers in a strong gravitational field than in a weak one. This means that a clock at the top of a tall building ticks a little bit more slowly than one on the ground floor. Of course the difference is measured in fractions of a nanosecond, but the difference is real, and measurable. In fact, the network of GPS satellites, which allow you to determine your location on Earth's surface to within a few meters based on timing signals received from multiple orbiting satellites, has to take these relativistic time differences into account. If the system didn't compensate for the fact that time flows at a different rate up in orbit where the satellites are located relative to our
GPS receivers on the ground, the timing signals would gradually drift out of sync, and this would cause your location to be determined incorrectly.

This means that another way to “time travel” into the future is to hang out someplace where the gravitational field is very strong, say just outside the event horizon of a black hole. Time will flow more slowly there for you than for someone located where the force of gravity is much weaker, such as the surface of a planet. If you spend a few years orbiting close to the black hole and then return to your home planet, you might find that centuries have elapsed there. Without violating any laws of physics, you would have effectively travelled into your planet's future.

The idea that time “flows” at different rates for different moving observers seems strange to us, but it turns out that the sort of limited time travel into the future permitted by Einstein leads to no logical inconsistencies or paradoxes. Time travel into the past is another matter.

The first entry in the series that deals with time travel into the past is the third movie,
Escape from the Planet of the Apes
. The film opens with Cornelius, Zira, and Dr. Milo emerging from a spaceship that has splashed down off the California coast in 1973. We eventually learn that the three apes escaped to our time by repairing Taylor's ship from the first film, and that shortly after leaving Earth they witnessed its destruction via the doomsday bomb explosion that closes the second film. The exact physical mechanism for their time travel from the future back to 1973 is not made particularly clear. Dr. Milo simply refers to a “backward disturbance in time” caused by the shockwave of the exploding Earth.

Is such a thing possible? There's no clear consensus among physicists over whether or not the laws governing our universe might permit time travel into the past. But there are enough reasons for hope not to discount the possibility out of hand. The first reason is that the fundamental laws of physics themselves are almost entirely agnostic about the difference between the past and future. The only place the difference between past and future is apparent is on the macroscopic scale—when discussing
the flow of heat, or the expansion of the universe, or the functioning of our brains.

All of the laws of physics that govern the individual interactions between individual objects at the microscopic scale are symmetric with respect to the reversal of time. So it seems as if that “arrow of time” that defines the flow of our experience from past to future is more like an emergent property of our universe than a fundamental one. If this is true, then traveling into the past might not break any fundamental laws of physics.

But how would we actually do it? How could we build a “time machine”? It turns out that Einstein's general theory of relativity, the same one which predicts the effect of gravity on the flow of time, allows certain solutions that appear to permit trajectories through spacetime that start in the present and wind up in the past. On paper, anyway. The various time-traveling solutions of general relativity involve exotic objects like “wormholes,” “ring singularities,” and “cosmic strings”—entities which may not actually exist outside of Einstein's equations as part of the real world. But the very fact that the laws of physics do not seem to expressly forbid time travel into the past, means that it's worthwhile examining the philosophical implications of the idea.

Whatever as-yet undiscovered physics enabled them to travel back to 1973,
Escape from the Planet of the Apes
opens with the three apes (four if you count Cornelius and Zira's unborn child) present in the Earth's “present”—which for them is the past. Their subsequent interaction with modern-day humans gives rise to an apparent paradox. If the humans of the twentieth century learn the fate of their civilization, might they take action to prevent it? This is exactly what Dr. Hasslein has in mind as he tries to exterminate the apes, considering them a threat to humanity's very existence. But if this attempt to change the Earth's fate were to succeed, how would we explain the presence of intelligent apes from a future that will now never come?