The Search For Alien Contacts

From the catchy five-note sequence in Steven Spielberg’s 1977 classic “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” to the cryptic pictograms in 2016’s blockbuster “Arrival,” alien languages have become a familiar element of science fiction. But these fictional lingos aren’t the only ways in which extraterrestrial civilizations have attempted to communicate with human beings. Scientists have been listening for alien life since 1960, when astronomer Frank Drake turned his telescope toward two stars that were similar to our sun and listened for some sort of signal that would indicate intelligent life beyond Earth.

The Alien Contacts for alien life has come a long way in over 50 years, but we haven’t detected anything yet. The search is better known as SETI, and it’s important to consider what life beyond the planet might mean for humanity, both positively and negatively. A recent study suggests that the social consequences of first contact could be far-reaching, affecting everything from terrestrial science to religion, politics, and ecosystems.

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It’s also necessary to examine how the prevailing legal frameworks that govern human rights might be applied to an extraterrestrial civilization. This isn’t easy, especially given the SETI community’s historical indebtedness to science fiction and broader cultural conceptualizations of otherness.

Nevertheless, the desire to look up at the sky and contemplate alien contact often corresponds to a refusal to look down and around, where interspecies contact plays out every day on our own planet. Contemporary American science fiction author Ted Chiang, in his short story “The Great Silence,” piercingly reflects on this dynamic, noting that the desire to look up at the skies for aliens — whether they exist or not — often reveals a blindness to the forms of interspecies contact that already take place every day on Earth.