by Michael Skinner

Created on: June 10, 2009   Last Updated: June 27, 2009

The most intriguing movies leave you with a question that only you can answer. In the film Contact, the viewer is left with the question of whether Jodie Foster talked with an alien who contrived to look like her father or if the whole thing was an elaborate hoax played by a dying old man.

One of the odder phenomena in science fiction is the alien bug eyed monster who is so alien to us that it has acid for blood and impenetrable skin and somehow it still wants to get into our bodies-Aliens for example. Although this premise makes for great and thrilling movies it is more than a little illogical. It's kind of like expecting the average, normal human being to be interested in slugs and slime molds. For biological reasons we are usually most interested in a range of textures that are similar to our own. If we weren't, mating and reproduction would never take place. Nature does have cases wherein males and females look very different but more often than not, size is and/or colors are the only real differences. Spiders dig spiders and ducks go for ducks. Spiders don't go for ducks-not even as food.

The Hitchiker's guide to the Galaxy, although a very silly book and movie, did have one thing right. If a species was truly alien to us, it would pay no more attention to us than we would to ants at a picnic. There was a famous science fiction story called Roadside Picnic that was based on just this premise. The most alien creatures I can think of on planet earth live near volcanic vents in the deep ocean. The water is boiling hot and probably acidic. It would kill us to be exposed to it for even a few seconds yet at least thousands and maybe billions of creatures thrive there. This reminds us of two things. If the aliens are sufficiently different, we may not perceive them at all or if we do perceive them, it may not seem to us that they are not alive.

One of the more stunning things about the creatures that live in a hot acid bath under the sea is that they have DNA just as we do. This brings up the point that we are not ready to encounter true aliens whose chemistry and biology are radically different from out own. As the movie War of the Worlds and the science fiction story Roadside Picnic assert, we may not want to come to the notice of a truly alien species. What do you do when the ants get into the food at a picnic?

In a series and movie like X-Files they do bring up the notion that aliens might want to change us and the planet to forms more suitable

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