A Guide to the End of Independence Day

I suppose this counts as a fan theory. I’ve seen this movie quite a few times, because I loved it as a kid and it used to be on TV all the time.

So sure.

Fan theory.

Well, here we go.

The other night, I was talking with my fiance about Spielberg’s 2005 War of the Worlds. I actually like that movie a lot. There are probably flaws; movies tend to have them. The ending just kind of happens because the alien species in question can’t handle the contents of a human sneeze, and that’s a perfectly fine explanation to me and would likely be the case if the invaders came unprepared, which they usually do. There’s no all-out, fiery awesome battle with a climactic explosion and worldwide celebration.

For that, we have another movie, 1996’s Independence Day, which catches a lot of flak for its ending (that seems in itself to be inspired by the ending of The War of the Worlds.) In said ending, a virus written on an Apple Powerbook to infect the ships of an entire civilization. This action disables the shields, and the invaders are destroyed. This does of course raise a perfectly legitimate concern regarding how that virus could infect a literal alien system.

That’s assuming it’s an alien system at all.

Ladies and gentlemen, I submit to you that the ending of Independence Day works not because its primary focus is action, but because the invaders aren’t alien invaders at all. They’re us.

To prove this theory, we have to lay out basic acceptable principles from the General Universe of Fiction. In other words, these are things that science fiction writers have come to accept and use.

First: humans are voracious consumers, and that can do damage when left unchecked. Second: time travel is real and possible. Third: wormholes and other weird stuff exist out there, they are safe, and they will displace you in space and very likely time. Fourth: something very strange happened near Roswell. Fifth: Living things adapt to change.

We see the second concept in many works of fiction, from The Time Machine, to Back to the Future, to Doctor Who. It’s not new. Wormholes are a feature in science, despite the fact that we haven’t confirmed any. Their possible use is too good to pass up. 2009’s Star Trek relied on a wormhole/electrical storm to bring the Romulan ship back from years in the future. Something did happen in New Mexico, even if it was only the crash of a human aircraft. It’s still weird, and it captures the imagination.

The movie Wall-E paints a picture of a future uninhabitable Earth covered in the trash that humanity has left behind when they departed on large ships. Wall-E is set about 700 years in the future. By the events of Wall-E, humans are basically soft-boned blobs of fat with no muscle tone, confined to hovering chairs, because the became used to a new environment. The only ship we see is the Axiom, but it’s most definitely not the only one. There are actually thousands of them. It would naturally follow that over centuries of travel, some ships might become unaccounted for.

Wall-E (the robot) also appears to run on Apple software, as proved when he boots back up and lets out the familiar chime. This would suggest that his entire line was powered by Apple technology. Now lately, Apple has been having some misses. Their stock fell quite a bit, and it seems that the company hasn’t really released any gamechangers lately. That said, it’s still solid and efficient tech and it would make sense for it to still be in use by the time Buy-N-Large sends starliners to escape a messy planet. If Wall-E’s line was programmed with it, likely the BNL fleet was as well. By then, it’s too effective and trusted as a reliable OS not to be used to basically give humanity a temporary home and work on cleaning up the Earth. It’s just easier to streamline large operations, and you’d likely have someone with the skills necessary to continue updating the hardware and software.

So far, we have an unaccounted for, inhabited ship, powered by Apple’s tech, wandering the galaxy. Possibly they saw what was coming: the likelihood of never going back to Earth and doing what it needs to do to adapt, like expanding. The ship could probably even do this automatically, with just computer commands.

The more we study it, the more the universe proves to be extremely strange. While wormholes are firmly hypothetical right now, they or something like them could be out among the stars. Eventually, a starliner might break down, or run out of resources. With the use of wormholes and other forms of interstellar and intergalactic travel, combined with any form of surveillance available, humanity would be able to find planets from which they could draw the things they need.

For a while it continues, and the population grows, along with the ship.

It should also be noted that our moon is huge, as far as moons go. With the right equipment, you could live on it and not feel like you’re on a giant boulder just tumbling around. We also slapped a plaque up there that says we came in peace for all mankind. You see it prominently featured in the beginning of Independence Day.

Let’s rewind a little. Independence Day has the main characters of the movie travel to Area 51. There, they discover that not only did a presumably alien craft actually crash in 1947, but the US government has been holding it for all that time, along with several bodies that are mostly intact. We see the alien bodies as roughly humanoid, in that they are bipedal and possessing of an exoskeleton.

It’s stated clearly in the film that the invaders make a constant practice of consuming everything on a planet before going to the next one. The fact that they seem to choose Earth means that they’ve already destroyed many Earthlike planets. It’s also obvious that the aliens are able to breathe our nitrogen/oxygen/argon mix.

The invaders also wear suits that are clearly biological in nature. Without the suit, they’re hairless, soft, and pretty much weaklings. The only weapon that the one appears to have is the debilitating noise it makes. In any case, these invaders possess an internal skeleton, are well able to breathe our atmosphere, and are pretty helpless without being hooked up to some kind of biomechanical suit. We don’t get to find out much more about them.

It’s no longer fantastical to predict that humans will one day be physically linked to machines. Not for life support, but for various things like communication, sense enhancement, and entertainment, among others.

So let’s finally go there, guys.

A human ship leaves our solar system years in the future, fleeing a now uninhabitable Earth. They suffer the same effects as we see on the Axiom, becoming dependent on the tech in the ship. Likely they will find some way to link themselves with machines, further increasing the dependency even as they are able to improve their surroundings and use the artificial intelligence on the Apple powered ship to do any menial work automatically. Since they are now completely separated from the rest of the human fleet, these people have no way of knowing that it eventually becomes safe to return to Earth.

So they continue on. When they run out of stuff, they use what they have to find a planet that has what they need. Like a starving man, they consume too much. Like a race intent on survival, no matter what, they feast, and they change. They develop a belief system that completely hinges on the fact that they’re a people fighting for survival. They waste nothing, not even the dead.

And one day, in this big universe, they run into something they weren’t expecting. A wormhole, or some sort of tear in spacetime, and they’re displaced. But something catches the crew’s attention. Ahead is a small blue planet like the one they left behind. They’re home, and everything looks to be okay again. There’s some hope, finally, because it’s Earth. This time, they’ll just disembark after a long journey, but they have to make sure it’s really okay. They hide behind our huge moon (it really is a very large moon, when you think about it) and send a tiny scout vessel. But something goes wrong, and it crashes. When communication with the crew is suddenly cut off, they know it’s bad. They have to recover the bodies. It’s a compulsion by now, not so much a prevention of waste as it is the right thing to do, but the bodies, and the ship, disappear amidst a lot of a human signatures.

The human ship, now completely different than what it was, hides behind the moon for nearly fifty years until they can’t stand it anymore. They decide to go after the little monsters that have taken over the planet, because in millenia of constant change, this part of humanity forgot what it was originally, and are pretty much not human anymore. They attack, and are mostly invincible. They tell the president of the United States that there can be no peace. That they desire a swift and immediate end to all Earth inhabitants.

Except they are vulnerable to viruses in their still Apple powered system. So when two humans come barging in on what appears to be that missing ship from fifty years before, and infect their systems with a virus from a little Apple computer it takes them down. One of the invaders sees a skull-and-crossbones pop up on the screen, cackling, and he tilts his head because it’s extremely familiar. Something cross-cultural.

Then the mothership, once a BNL starliner, explodes, taken down by the very technology that powered it through the stars for so many years.

Due to lack of communication, humanity survives to consume, throw stuff away, leave the planet, suffer the effects of long-term space travel, and eventually forget who they were, only to come back and do it all over again when they hit that wormhole years in the future, because neither learned from the other.

TL;DR: A virus written on an Apple Powerbook can take down the alien ship in Independence Day because the invaders are humans from the future, changed by environmental influences and traveling on ships powered by Apple tech.