Sufficiently Advanced Alien - Television Tropes & Idioms

alt title(s): Sufficiently Advanced; Sufficiently Advanced Aliens

Any sufficiently advanced alien is indistinguishable from a god.

— Corollary to Arthur C Clarke's Third Law

Godlike aliens. Boy, do I hate godlike aliens. I'll take a critter over a godlike alien any time.

— John Crichton, Farscape

You found me out. I'm not really a god. I'm just an ordinary eternal, omniscient, super-intelligent being.

— Sun God, Futurama

You know the type. Sooner or later one shows up on every Space Opera or Wagon Train To The Stars. They're the alien being that can do anything with the wave of a hand (or tentacle, or tendril of energy). Sometimes they're hostile, sometimes they're benevolent, but either way they really cramp the style of a young, expanding race looking to make a name for itself on the galactic scene. Usually, though, they tend to just be omnipotent jackasses, looking for a cheap laugh. Sometimes you can exploit their sense of honor or fair play, or their desire for solitude, to make them go away. Or maybe you just have to wait for their parents to come and take them home. Unfortunately, you can't always get rid of them — just ask Jean-Luc Picard. (And don't even get his colleague Capt. Janeway started.)

If you have to use something that's recognizable to the viewer as a machine, you're not Sufficiently Advanced. If you can just wave your hand and things happen, you probably are. (Machines are allowed for really big effects, like making galaxies explode or transporting a planet from one side of the galaxy to another.)

What actually separates Sufficiently Advanced Aliens from genuine gods can get a little vague, especially with the likes of the Ori, or for that matter Q, who do claim to be deities, or, for that matter, Juraian royalty, who don't, but are. Usually, being found in space and/or opposing the heroes' lack of belief is considered enough reason to reject their claims.

Sometimes, they'll show up to put Humanity On Trial. Occasionally, a human or humanoid alien will be assumed into their ranks. Often these beings will claim to be "more highly evolved" than humans, and that someday, if we're good little corporeals and eat all our vegetables and overcome our bratty ways, we might grow up to be like them — but probably not, because we suck.

See also Great Gazoo and Energy Beings. When humans are treated like this, it's Humans Are Cthulhu or Thank The Maker. Conversely, if these beings are far enough removed from human understanding, they can be considered Cosmic Horrors, in which case they at least have the decency to take on A Form You Are Comfortable With.

Contrast with Cargo Cult and Ancient Astronauts. And Physical God, for an approach from the other side of the spectrum. Naturally, they are nothing like the Insufficiently Advanced Alien.

If you want to go and try to compare these alien heavyweights, then you are Abusing The Kardashev Scale For Fun And Profit.

Examples

Anime and Manga

The Anti-Spirals of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. They live "in the space between the tenth and eleventh dimensions", can accurately count the exact number of people living on a given planet instantly, hide the moon in a dimensional pocket, and insert genetic programming into individuals of other races to use them as messengers. Furthermore, they can create virtual spaces in which they control all the laws of physics, even directly modifying the probabilities of events occurring, and they can trap their opponents within these spaces. To say nothing of their cruder abilities: physically tossing entire galaxies as weapons.
- And throwing Big Bangs around like KiAttacks.
- While arguably, these feats are incredible by themselves, it is obvious nobody actually consider them Gods. Not even the scared running-away people. The Spiral team knows their nature, those who studied the events that lead to this also know they're just aliens, and their first ship can be destroyed, albeit with exploding consequences. The dimensional powers are also considered scientific and non-God-like. And let's not forget the end, where the Spiral entities gain as much power as them, and again they're not looked at as Gods, nor is their super-mecha and so on.
Nagato Yuki of Suzumiya Haruhi is a prime example of this. By chanting computer code, she can manipulate matter and space with great precision and scope.
- Yuki also has a superior, the mysterious Kimidori Emiri, and two Evil Counterparts: Asakura Ryouko, a superpowered, really, really freaking scary Yandere, who tries to kill Kyon without even losing her cool and nice attitude, and Kuyou Suou, an Emotionless Girl whose alien race is at war with Yuki's.
- Also includes a bit of a Starfish Aliens touch, in that they had to create humans in order to try to understand them (the "alien" characters would be more accurately described as artificial humans) and are rather interested in the fact that mere matter can apparently have intelligence.
In Tenchi Muyo the Juraian royalty are semi-divine Sufficiently Advanced Aliens basically through the pact struck with Tsunami, one of their universe's three Physical Gods. (Before that they were and still are just Space Pirates.) The Word Of God also has it that their world has a real, transcendental God who created said her and her two Sisters, and that this God is Tenchi.
The manga version of Chrono Crusade has a borderline example: Demons are really aliens that escaped their world's destruction by coming to Earth, only to crash upon entering the planet's surface, their ship sinking to the bottom of the sea. They're not all-powerful, but they're strange enough and powerful enough that humans believe they must be supernatural beings.
The Golden Tribe of Heroic Age. They were reputed to be able to create planets and predict the future (though whether these tasks required the use of machines or not is never explained), and are treated as gods by the Silver Tribe.
In Neon Genesis Evangelion, the nemesis that come after humans are called Angels, akin to Gods. What Shinji does at the end also seems to incline to religion, although it may be interpreted as just science, putting the right objects in the right place and having the desired reaction.

Comic Books

The Marvel Universe has tons of these; probably the most famous is Galactus, planet-eating antagonist of the Fantastic Four.
- Runners-up would be the Watchers and the Celestials (who hate each other's guts, interestingly).
- The Impossible Man is quite powerful, but mostly just spends his time annoying people.
- Even the more traditional gods like the Asgardians, Olympians and Heliopolitans are close to being SA As — especially the latter.
The DCU has its own fair share. Darkseid and the New Gods are perhaps the most well known, and perhaps falls under a different trope entirely.
- The Guardians of the Universe, who created the Green Lantern Corps, are immortal aliens with vastly powerful personal super-abilities.
  - However, this is both played straight and subverted in that the Guardians, for all of their power, are extremely naive, arrogant, and foolish when viewing those who are lesser than them (i.e. nearly everyone in the universe). Their ineptitude has led to the War of Light and the rise of the Black Lantern Corps.
It's worth noting that of the entries above, Jack Kirby actually created two of them personally (the Celestials and the New Gods) and had a hand in creating two others (the Watchers and Galactus). This trope seems to really have appealed to him.
- The Celestials and the Watchers both answer to the same boss, the Fulcrum, who runs the universe (the Celestials created life, The Horde destroys life and the Watchers record it all).
Dr. Manhattan of Watchmen managed to become a Sufficiently Advanced Alien without being an alien and without having to advance. It just happened. Which is a neat trick.

Film

In John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness it is revealed that the Church has hidden the truth for two-thousand years — that Jesus was an alien.

Literature

This is the central conflict of Contact by Carl Sagan. The main character is an atheist and believes in rational explanations for everything, but at the end her journey to the center of the galaxy is revealed to be in every respect a religious experience, where the alien beings are God. She finds herself without any proof, asking the world to take a leap of faith, in the same position as the religious nutjobs on cable.
- Actually it's a bit different as there are five of them who all have similar fantastical stories, and the aliens actually do provide several means of proving that their trip actually took place. In the end, Ellie actually does prove it by finding a message hidden in the number pi by the creator of the universe.
In Arthur C Clarke's own Rama series of novels, the unseen beings responsible for the construction of Rama and its sister vessels are compared to God by the characters.
- It would perhaps be more accurate to call them Gentry Lee's series of novels.
  - However the creators of the monoliths in 2001 and its sequels definitely qualify, as does the Overmind of his Childhood's End.
The idea of the Christian God being a Sufficiently Advanced Alien appears in probably more SF stories than can be easily enumerated, but this verges more upon the territory covered by Ancient Astronauts.
Most of HP Lovecraft's aliens fall into this category.
- Although Cthulhu and his ilk are also clearly godlike in that they do not even have hidden technology. They just are. In fact, Lovecraftian characters' tendency to mistake the aliens for gods extends to the fans as well. Ask a general Lovecraft fan, and he will very likely tell you, "Cthulhu is a god."
  - Although, Cthulhu really is a god. We are so used to transcendental God(s) from Christianity, Judaism, Islam or Hinduism, that we forgot, that there were religions worshipping more material Ones. Compare the ancient Greek divinities: they had bodies, they lived on a hill, they drunk wine and had (lots of) sex. You can not deny Cthulhu is a god, just by pointing that he has a position in three-dimensional space.
  - Except, of course, that it is stated in the original story that Cthulhu is a high-priest rather than a god. He is, however, treated much like a god by his followers, and the exact distinction is not clear.
  - This troper would suggest that beings such as Cthulhu or Hastur might not necessarily be gods in the conventional sense, but given that they are so improbably old and powerful they are indistinguishable from gods. See the quote at the beginning of the article... if it looks like a god and smites like a god, you're probably safest on your knees.
- Only in the expansions. In the original canon, they are just aliens. Cthulhu is ripped apart by a boat for crissakes. The aliens being actual gods is something added by later writers, and detracts from Lovecraft's original premise of cosmic horror.
  - If you bother to read onward, Cthulhu doesn't remain ripped apart for many minutes; he simply puts himself back together. Also, there are actual gods in Lovecraft's universe, written by the man himself; the Other Gods who at the centre of the Universe or the centre of Chaos (he's a bit unclear about that), are ultimate representatives of cosmic principles, and their lord, the Demon Sultan Azathoth is the creator of all the worlds. However, like the universal laws they represent, they are blind and mindless in every conventional sense of the word. They have a Soul and Messenger, Nyarlathotep the Crawling Chaos, who is very much sentient, but his exact nature and objectives are left unclear, although it appears that something in the humanity interests him, on occasion. The later writers of the mythos have often have mixed the alien Great Old Ones and the true Other Gods with each other, and in the case of August Derleth, added in some "good" deities to boot, effectively destroying the point Lovecraft was trying to make. (Although to be fair, most of those post-Derleth who used the Elder Gods that Derleth declared "Good" portrayed them as beings who really couldn't give a crap about Humanity either, but wanted to keep the various Old Ones and especially the Outer Gods (who could, in theory, destroy the whole goddamn universe by simply waking up)asleep,and so from our pitiful Human perspective that makes them good (although they almost certainly would eliminate our Insignificant Little Blue Planet if it would give them a few aeons more of Old One Sleep).
  - So-called actual gods also have bodies. The Lovecraft's universe is just a bit different from the ours.
  - Whether the Outer Gods have true physical bodies is a bit difficult to say, as they exist outside our universe (in fact, they seem to exist in whatever it is that's between different universes), where the laws of physics as we know them don't exist, and what bodies they have are not formed of anything we could call matter. To interact with our universe they can create avatars or send their messenger Nyarlathotep. Essentially while Cthulhu and his kind are somewhere between a Physical God and a Sufficiently Advanced Alien (or extradimensional being), the Outer Gods are as close to traditional gods as you can get. Yog-Sothoth in particular is omniscient, pretty much omnipotent, exists in every point in space and time at once, causes pregnancies in unmarried women which produce special children with miraculous abilities, and he can smite your ass with Lightning from Beyond. Sounds familiar?
  - Wilbur Whateley died for your sins!
- Lovecraft did write several stories involving gods like Nodens, Bokrug and even ones from established mythology like Hypnos and Bast, who conform better to traditional ideas of godhood, but there's a very good reason for that. Since they're all set in Dream Land, they actually are traditional ideas of godhood.
The Ellimist from Animorphs, as well as his Evil Counterpart Crayak.
- Though in a sense, they actually became gods.
- Also the briefly mentioned being who drove Crayak from his home galaxy (and is implied to be even worse than he is!).
Uriel from Clive Barker's Weaveworld is probably one of these, although it's bought into its own hype and thinks it's an angel.
The title character of Isaac Asimov's "Azazel" series of short stories is either this, or an actual demon — and possibly both. The stories can't seem to make up their mind, which fits in with the Unreliable Narrator who may just be making them all up.
The Culture.
Flinx from the Humanx Commonwealth series seems to stumble over the leftover super-devices of Sufficiently Advanced Aliens every other novel.
The Gods (or "Ymirian Guards") in Nerhûn are actually highly advanced aliens from the nearby planet Ymir who used Enôr as an experimental location for genetic modification. It got slightly out of hand, though...
The eponymous aliens of S. M. Stirling's The Lords Of Creation series alter environments on a planetary scale and create interdimensional gateways with ease.
The eponymous AI of Charles Stross' Eschaton universe has the power to have scooped up a large chunk of humanity and scattered it both across lightyears of space and centuries of time. It's also been known to wipe out entire solar systems that mess with time travel.
The Priest-Kings of Gor, who for some reason, kidnap human from Earth, remove any type of firearm, dump them on the eponymous planet and have them create a society that would make the Dark Ages look feminist. Their reasons are unknown, maybe they're just really bored, or just that into human porn.
The Strugatsky brothers play with this trope on two different occasions. Their main mythos includes a hypothetical (known only through archeological evidence) race called Stranniki ("Wanderers") who are suspected of messing with human civilization in unclear ways. Roadside Picnic is based on the premise that sufficiently advanced aliens visit Earth, leaving a bunch of (again) confusing artifacts.
Palmer Eldritch in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is an example of this trope.

Live Action TV

It seems like Star Trek had dozens of these buggers running around the edges of the Federation: Trelane, the so-called "Squire of Gothos"; the Organians; the Q; the Thasians, who reared Charlie "Charlie X" Evans; The Companion; Nagilum; the Caretaker; the Douwd (one of whom wiped out an entire expansionist empire in a fit of anger); Bajor's "Prophets" (even though they never came out of the wormhole); Apollo and the other Olympians; even Quetzalcoatl (in an episode of the animated series). It's implied that Wesley Crusher became one when he was Put On A Bus, as did Kes from Star Trek Voyager. It should be noted that the Q are ambiguous, for in "Hide and Q," the Q Continuum was worried that humans would eventually surpass them. (Well, we are special after all.)
- The Caretaker is debatable, given that a lot of its abilities were clearly technology-based.
- Oddly enough, Star Trek had its own subtrope where it seemed that anyone on their way to becoming a Sufficiently Advanced Alien became a complete moron for a good portion of that evolution, and it often worked with the actual Sufficiently Advanced Aliens as well. Star Trek just loved to have the guys with much more advanced evolution and technology look like drooling children so that whoever was in charge of the bridge at the time could make a condescending little speech while smirking knowingly. I guess their ultimate lesson was that the Sufficiently Advanced Aliens... weren't, since they weren't Human.
  - It's more that we expect aliens, like ourselves, to advance technologically faster than they advance personally.
  - "We thank you, Captain. Your wisdom is exceeded only by your smugness." — Cod Co ST:TNG parody
  - That subtrope was mainly an aspect of Next Generation, which liked to get very Anvilicious with the Humans Are Special Fantastic Aesop. By contrast, the Originial Series episodes with godlike aliens usually ended with the crew feeling humbled and awed by the encounter rather than smug and self-satisfied. The Organians in "Errand of Mercy" are probably the best example of this. Deep Space Nine similarly treated the Wormhole Aliens with a great deal of respect.
- One Star Trek The Next Generation episode had Picard Mistaken For God by a primitive tribe — he commands a ship that flies, can transport himself and his followers from place to place, and conjure voices from the air; why not call him a god?
  - There was also the TOS episode in which Kirk was exploring the interior of an alien obelisk, all alone, when he just happened to use the exact sequence of phonemes which triggered some kind of education beam, blanking his memory. When he stumbles out of the obelisk, the native population (who just happen to be passing at that exact moment) reckon that because he came from inside their sacred obelisk, he must be a god. Being amnesiac, he doesn't contradict them (for all he currently knows, they could be right).
  - In another one ("Devil's Due"), a con woman attempted to trick a (rather credulous) planetary population into thinking she was the devil with whom they had a millennial contract, via various effects such as transporters and a cloaked vessel, less than impressive to our heroes (although it did provide Data with the excuse for the line, "The advocate will refrain from making her opponent disappear.")
Babylon 5 had the First Ones. The Vorlons and the Shadows were almost but not quite Sufficiently Advanced. (If you have to travel through space in a ship, you're probably not Sufficiently Advanced. After all, what does a God need with a starship?)
- And then there's Lorien, THE first one, and who can essentially become his own spaceship.
- Lorien and the rest of the First Ones aren't in the same league as the other Sufficiently Advanced Aliens listed here. The B5 heavies can conjure matter using their own thoughts, but this a parlor trick compared to the kind of universe-wide reality bending abilities demonstrated by the truly Sufficiently Advanced.
Stargate SG-1 has the Goa'uld, who aren't really Sufficiently Advanced, but do a good imitation, mostly by virtue of nifty gadgetry rather than inherent powers. (SG-1 actually does a subversion on this trope, in that the Goa'uld are Sufficiently Advanced compared to the more primitive human diaspora cultures, but current Earth-born humans — and some limited number of the dispersed humanity — are themselves advanced enough to remain unconvinced.)
- Hell, even SG-1 has been mistaken for Sufficiently Advanced Aliens at times, especially when they came across the really primitive planets.
- Their newest Big Bad, the Ori, are even more advanced aliens, so much so that, as their agents suggest, there's a fair argument to be made that they really are gods — they're all-knowing, all-powerful, and may have literally created (a branch of) humanity in their own image. They would qualify as Sufficiently Advanced.
- The Ancients, the "good guy" counterpart to the Ori, are also "ascended" human-like beings. Though they have a strict policy of not interfering in mortal matters, the Ancients left all sorts of neat tech lying around when they ascended (including the eponymous stargates and city of Atlantis) so they are Sufficiently Advanced, even if their case for actual godhood is as good as the Ori's. These two are almost their own trope: SO advanced they really ARE gods!
  - The Ancients are often said to have re-created human life across the galaxy when they started ascending. So if they aren't gods, they are sufficiently advanced creators.
- This troper would like to nominate the Nox as Sufficiently Advanced. Due to something the Stargate Wikia entry calls "Bio-electrical Tuning", they can do things like resurrect the dead and make things invisible. If that ain't sufficiently advanced...
- How can anyone forget the Asgard? They posed as gods to some really primitive planets, while protecting them from the Goa'uld. Even though they are benevolent, it still fits.
  - No it doesn't, the Asgard are extremely dependent on technology. They themselves are actually very insufficiently advanced, their own bodies failing and being unable to ascend. If they were Sufficiently Advanced, they wouldn't need ships at all.
- Presumably the Furlings are as well, since they were part of the alliance with the Asgard, Nox, and Ancients.
As the page quote indicates, John Crichton encountered these occasionally, although they usually turned out to be fairly limited. The one that inspired the page quote was actually a technologically dependent mercenary Energy Being. The Ancients came a lot closer with power to control minds, open wormholes, and in the case of at least one "wrap time around his little finger" but were still in danger of extinction.
Doctor Who is a rare example of a show that works with a Sufficiently Advanced Alien as the main character, primarily because of the liberal use of The Watson.
- Although other aliens are more advanced than that. The Black and White Guardians for instance, or the Eternals, who dismiss the Time Lords with "Are there Lords of such a small domain?" In the Expanded Universe novels, a group of Eternals are the seldom-mentioned gods of Gallifrey.
  - The Doctor still travels in a spaceship. It could be argued, by what is said at the beginning of this page, he isn't a Sufficiently Advanced Alien at all. If anything, his constant meddling with human history would make him closer to an Ancient Astronaut.
  - Or Future Astronaut?

Real Life

Cargo Cults prove that people are already sufficiently advanced.
10th Century cleric Gerbert D'Aurillac (later Pope Sylvester II) was one of the first Europeans to learn and to understand the implications of Arabic numerals. The comparatively advanced inventions and skills he derived from his knowledge (wonderfully precise models of the earth, an improved version of the abacus, a sweetly tuned hydraulic organ, the ability to calculate restaurant gratuity in his head) led to a contemporary reputation as a necromancer.

Tabletop Games

The C'tan of Warhammer 40000.
- The C'tan possibly qualify as "actual" gods in that universe (they're certainly supernatural at least) but they still use tech, particularly in that most of their influence comes from their enslaved space-undead servants, the Necrons. Apparently sometimes God does need starships.
  - Consider that the C'Tan use robots like more conventional gods use meatbag worshippers.
  - C'tan aren't warp-based like "true" gods, which are formed by emotions and beliefs of mortals, but instead extremely powerful Energy Beings. They also lack many of the abilities of true gods, such as being able to bless or protect their servants.
- The C'Tan may fall somewhere between Sufficiently Advanced Aliens and Energy Beings, given that they had no physical form and little power to influence the world until their followers gave them bodies.

Video Games

In Spore, the creatures that you evolve can eventually become Sufficiently Advanced when the evolve into the Spacefaring Stage, where you can do everything from simulate global warming by dumping Carbon Dioxide into a planet's atmosphere (turning it into a giant magma planet after a few eons), to putting monoliths on planets, to phoning distant worlds ET style, to blowing up distant worlds with a Death Star (sniff... they grow up so fast...).
- Not only that, but traveling to the center of the galaxy gives you the limited ability to breathe life into dead planets.
Some theories have the G-Man in the Half Life series be one of these.
- He clearly fits the description as he is able to manipulate reality, stop time and teleport people into bizarre alien realms, all without twitching a muscle. He also appears completely unconcerned by the carnage going on around him.
The Forerunners of Halo come fairly close. They are hailed as nigh-omnipotent by the Covenant and while they were not beyond using technology, they could effect changes on a galactic scale (such as, oh, let's say eradicating all sentient life in the galaxy in order to starve out the Flood).
- And even the Forerunners were following the lead of the Precursors, who were supposedly even more powerful and may have created the templates on which most Forerunner technology was built.
The Val-Fasq in the Galaxy Angel Gameverse.
Mother has Giygas, who is a sufficiently advanced alien — advanced enough to where the form of his attacks are incomprehensible, even to psychics. The sequel, Earth Bound, upgrades Giygas to Cosmic Horror status.
The final boss of the first Shadow Hearts, Meta-God, is explicitly described as an alien so powerful humanity is on the level of ants compared to it. The purpose of The Very Definitely Final Dungeon is to call it to Earth so that it will lay waste to the planet.
The Longest Journey gives us the Draic Kin (who are also the local breed of dragons): four ridiculously overpowered individuals, one of whom basically runs one world while another single-handedly battles all of the other world's evils at once.
The Ancients from Might And Magic; they create worlds for fun.
The Cuotl from the game Rise Of Legends appear Sufficiently Advanced, since their alien technology is literally light years ahead of the steampunk Vinci and the magical Alin.

Webcomics

The Prime Movers in Buck Godot are Sufficiently Advanced Aliens, and are stated to be omnipotent (atleast they're very good at bending the laws of physics and geometry).
- Lord Therizmote is most likely one too. His abilities are never explicitly shown or mentioned, but he is mentioned to be a Class 1 Power (by comparison, an alien with the power to teleport entire planets around was classified as Class 8 and humanity is a Class 12 Power). He does possess some nifty techonolgy atleast, such as a waste disposal unit that creates miniature black holes.

Web Original

Subverted in The Salvation War. The demons and angel are very much insufficiently advanced to deal with modern weaponry. However played straight in that this is what they were when they first showed up in the Bronze Age.

Western Animation

Primus, and by extension his polar opposite Unicron, from Transformers. Primus created the Transformers, and his physical form is their homeworld, Cybertron. Unicron has altered a number of Transformers to his own liking, goes around eating planets, and transforms into a planet himself. Whether or not they're actually gods is entirely dependent on what segment of the mythos you're in.
- Beast Wars has the Vok, the mysterious, skull-shaped aliens who police the space-time continuum and may have created the Earth as an elaborate experiment (and then tried to blow it up with a moon-sized Death Ray). According to some Word Of God (their origins are never explained and even the writers never really made up their minds on it) they might actually be hyperevolved humans.
  - Or they might be sentient robo-cancer post-Mind Hug.
Sul, the Avatar Satis and Canaletto on Oban Star Racers. The Creators, on the other hand, may actually be gods.