BY EMERSON LAYNE

For as long as humans have studied the stars and planets in our infinite skies, a question lingered, is there intelligent life elsewhere? For how lucky our planet is to be able to house life, it isn’t unreasonable to believe that planets like our own are out there in the universe somewhere. Countless times in fictional media, there have been predictions or interpretations of what alien life might look like. Usually, alien life has “unnatural” colors of floral and animal life compared to our world. Many times the more intelligent species of an alien planet are humanoid in appearance and usually are hostile to human life with alien invasions or exterminations. While this is more up to metaphorical reasoning for aliens to act this way in a fictional setting, rather than something that leans to more scientific reasoning. So, is there intelligent life out in the universe? What would happen if humans and aliens did meet?

Our understanding of the universe is that it is infinite and ever expanding. For something that is infinite, one thing cannot happen once, in this case being only one planet having intelligent life. So there is most likely life somewhere else in the universe. Why haven’t humans seen them yet? Simply put, humans and aliens are unable to reach each other. Even if humans created a spacecraft that has infinite energy and can sustain long distances, humans would have to create a society on that ship to continue on the mission. Multiple generations of humans would have to operate the ship or have AI or robots control the ship. Even with robots, multiple generations on Earth would have to communicate and monitor the robots on the ship. The closest planet to our own that could potentially support life is Proxima Centauri b, which is four light years away. But, for a hypothetical scenario, what if humans and aliens could actually meet? 

At this time in human history, humans are unable to visit any other planet that could be inhabitable due to technology reasons. So, let’s assume an alien species has the technology to come to Earth. Depending on how far advanced this alien species technology is, we could be able to see them coming to Earth before they arrive, through telescopes and satellites. Places like NASA and other civil space companies that see this incoming spacecraft would most likely tell the government about what they see. For a short while, the federal government would try to keep the situation under wraps, but many non-governmental agencies would announce that something is coming to Earth. Once the spacecraft comes into close proximity to Earth, independent scientists and civilians would be able to see the spacecraft and eventually tell media outlets and news companies. The news of an alien spacecraft would be out and it would be reasonable to assume that there would be a state of panic throughout the world. Governments would try to keep their civilians calm as they continue to try to contact the incoming spacecraft. Since the alien spacecraft has been incoming to Earth for a while, it’s plausible to assume aliens could have studied Earth enough to learn a common language or learn how to write a human language. 

When the spacecraft is landing, government officials on the ground would set up an operation of sorts to monitor the alien spacecraft as it enters or orbits Earth’s atmosphere. In most fictional media scenarios, aliens would either go in two directions: either being hostile invaders or passive. In the scenario that the aliens are hostile, a battle or war would most likely play out. Logically, hostile aliens would want resources from Earth or something similar in mind. It would be difficult to say whether humans or aliens would win that fight. Humans would have a home field advantage over the aliens, while the aliens could have better technology than humans do. In the case if aliens were passive, humans and aliens would plausibly establish a line of communication with each other. Afterward, a multitude of directions would be possible. Humans and aliens could establish an allyship between species, an exchange of information from history, scientific knowledge, mathematics, and visuals of each other’s worlds, humans potentially visiting the alien’s planet, and so much more. All of this mainly hinged on that aliens could survive in our environment and theirs to us. Regarding the alien’s appearance and anatomy, humans wouldn’t be able to scientifically predict what an alien would look like. So, an aliens’ appearance at this point would strictly stay to fiction. 

Humans meeting aliens would happen a long way from now. For the time being, humans would just have to wonder and imagine what aliens would look like and where out in the universe they would be. Right now, aliens could be looking at their own sky and foreign stars, wondering the same thing.