Humans are still searching for signs of intelligent alien life on other planets – but how would we react towards it if we ever did make contact?
According to many of our cultural touchstones, there’s only one thing for it if extraterrestrials ever take a cosmic detour to our planet: heavy artillery fire.
But from the sugary 1980s blockbuster ET the Extra-Terrestrial and the decades of Star Trek episodes to the books of Isaac Asimov and Ursula K Le Guin, science fiction writers have long wrangled with the question: how would we really treat them?
In popular culture, extraterrestrials are often cast as second-class citizens or less than human. If it weren’t for the intervention of ET’s human friend, the titular alien would have been cut open on an operating room table. In the 2009 film District 9, millions of alien “prawns” are packed into South African slums – an allegory for human bigotry and cruelty in real life.
