I am smarter than Neil deGrasse Tyson...but just this once. Still, I can't help but take to the internet and brag about it. The guy knows pretty much everything about everything and any chance to one up him is a chance I have to take. So let me tell you about it in open letter format.

Dear Mr. Tyson,

I would like to quote you to you from an excerpt in your book "Death By Black Hole". The section presented is from the chapter entitled "Life in the Universe". You made some excellent points in the chapter about the lack of creativity in Hollywood. You were exceptionally gentle when discussing the silliness of Star Trek: The Motion Picture's V-Ger alien: a life-form made so intelligent it could rival Kirk and his cohorts but not figure out that its name was actually Voyager. I have never heard this approach before because few people will let a conversation regarding that film get any further than "Sweet Jesus, that movie was awful." Even the creators of the recent Original Star Trek movie boxed set conveniently forgot that the first of the series existed. So lets just all agree Wrath of Khan is actually Star Trek 1 and move on. But I degrass, lets talk about Independence Day.

As per you:

I am glad that, in the end, the humans win. We conquer the Independence Day aliens by having a Macintosh laptop computer upload a software virus to the mothership to disarm its protective force field. I don't know about you, but i have trouble just uploading files to other computers within my own department, especially when the operating systems are different. There is only one solution. The entire defense system for the alien mothership must have been powered by the same release of Apple Computer's system software as the laptop computer that delivered the virus.

This is actually quite incorrect.

Now don't get me wrong. The idea that the fate of the human race could rest on the barely debatable merits of an Apple Macintosh or in the hands of someone who would actually use one is ridiculous at best but nevertheless it is, at the very least, possible. Of course a race of super-intelligent aliens wouldn't bother using an Apple operating system. They seemed rather full of themselves which leads me to believe they are using some flavor of Linux, most likely Gentoo. The operating system however would not come into play when considering the technology that would have been required to disable the defense system of the ID4 aliens.

The character Jeff Goldblum, played by Jeff Goldblum in this movie, admits early on to stumbling onto the alien radio signal. Using some basic deduction about the nature of the signal he determined that it was most likely a count-down. This sets precedence that the aliens are in fact using some sort of wireless signal and that our heroes can interact with it if only at a read level. Then later Dr. Okun, played by Data, explains that the introduction of the mother-ship into Earth's general galactic location spooled up the gizmos and gadgets of the previously recovered crown jewel of his Area 51 space lab, the crashed alien fighter craft. Now if we assume that a standard in any communication between 2 of pretty much anything is a statement from the first anything followed by a response from the second anything that it did indeed receive the statement, then we can assume our own technology can be used as a template for ideas to destroy your jellyfish hammerheads.

Computer network transmissions, wireless or otherwise work on the concept of the packet. A packet knows itself well as it has a unique id that makes it distinguishable from all other packets at the very least within the bounds of the network it is passed on and over a reasonable period of time. So when a computer wants to talk to another one, it breaks what it wants to say into these packets and sends them out waiting anxiously for a reply that each packet has been received. God forbid a packet doesn't get there, that's okay, it will just be resent until someone or something admits they received it. If the data in these packets is encrypted, its going to be difficult to do anything useful with it if it is intercepted, but it probably wouldn't be all that difficult to learn enough about the encrypted data to spoof it especially if you have people working on it that are so smart that Robert Loggia and Adam Baldwin are hired to protect them. You have to figure if RF interference from a hair dryer can fudge up a conversation on a nearby cellular phone, a determined Goldblum with a feeble Mac could do some damage. If he was able to spoof a packet's id well enough, even if the alien receivers didn't know what to do with it , they would be forced to accept and try to interpret it. Send enough of these packets and now you are talking about a confusion induced "Fox 2" free for all.

We could discuss the use of the term upload in the movie. If Jeff was in fact just transferring spoofed packets it wouldn't be a file at all, it would just be data on some kind of transport layer. But since the aliens were using Gentoo Linux, we know that they fancy an operating system that doesn't, at least not at the user level, recognize much difference between files and hardware. So lets just say Jeff was just piping the output of some software that spoofs jellyfish packets into a receiving device of the aliens machine. Where as 30 years ago, Hollywood might have just said "Jeff saved the day by using his computer", now they have enough faith in people to throw the word upload in for questionable authenticity. My mom, of sending files, simply says "I modemed it". To this day, I have never heard any other person turn modem into a verb.

I wouldn't mind knowing why they felt they had to fly their hijacked ship into the mother-ship to deliver the "virus". Jeff had knowledge of at least one frequency of the alien transmission and probably could have searched around the dial for any others they might have been using and perhaps uploaded it via one of those wireless signals. We could speculate about the full or half duplex of wireless transmissions to a fighter ship verses from it. Also, even humans tend to loosen the security of a node if it is wired directly to the network so maybe that had something to do with it. Still, he could have at least tried. Perhaps he didn't think of it. He does, after all, own a Mac.

So I hope you now see that the reason Jeff Goldblum could save the planet with a Macintosh is because theoretically he could have saved the day with a finely tuned hair-dryer, but in the end we must accept that Revlon probably doesn't have the marketing reach that Apple enjoys. Vastly more important is the fact that neither have a right mouse button.

Thank you for indulging me, I had to get all that off my chest.

Sincerely,
spaZdaq

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