Maybe I’ve been watching too many old movies.

Or maybe the body snatchers are back.

We’ve seen them twice before in my home state of California. Both invasions—of pod aliens, who secretly arrive from outer space to make our bodies their own—may have been interstellar, but they showed up first as attacks on local communities, forcing local governments to handle the response.

Neither our institutions nor our officials were up to the challenges back then. Today, with the body snatchers back, and not just in the Golden State, local governments seem less prepared than ever to fight back and defend themselves against these insidious enemies and the existential threat they pose to human survival.

The first invasion came in 1956, in Santa Mira, California—though you won’t find the city on any map—and no one was ready. Yes, several townspeople noticed that their relatives and friends, who looked and sounded the same, no longer seemed to be quite themselves. Only a local health official, Dr. Miles J. Bennell, investigated. But by the time he figured out what was up, there were no humans left in town to believe him. The pod people had taken over their bodies. He fled.

Then, in 1978, the body snatchers arrived in San Francisco. Only a San Francisco County health inspector, Matt Bennell (no obvious relation to the Santa Mira doctor), recognized the problem. But he and the local health bureaucracy couldn’t keep up with the pod people. In just a few days, the aliens, demonstrating an otherworldly commitment to using the Bay Area’s famously disjointed transit system, replaced virtually all the humans across the region.

Now, at this point I must confess that not everyone believes these body snatchers were real. Many people maintain they were just the villains in two different classic horror films, both named Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

And perhaps the body snatchers were just cinematic.

Or perhaps that’s what the pod people want us to believe.

Regardless, cultural pundits have seized on possible larger meanings of the body snatcher invasions, and how they reflected the political and cultural fears of their respective eras.

Critics suggested the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers was about how McCarthyism had seized our minds, transforming many Americans into paranoid, red-hating anti-communists. “I’ve been gone for five years. I feel like a stranger in my own country,” says one Santa Mira resident who suspects that their neighbors are no longer the people he once knew.

The 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, set in gritty San Francisco, was said to be about the alienation created by that decade’s violence, urban chaos, pollution, and the loss of social trust. Adding to the anxiety of the era, the film appeared in theaters just three weeks after the assassinations of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk.

“It’s like there’s some kind of hallucinatory flu going around,” says a San Francisco psychiatrist, who looks a lot like Leonard Nimoy. The health inspector Bennell, the spitting image of Donald Sutherland, says, “I know I feel like I’ve been poisoned today.”

While watching these two films during the scarily hot and fear-filled summer of 2024, I found them timely, relevant—and real.

Today, our neighbors and friends don’t seem quite themselves. It’s as if they have been taken over by loneliness. It’s as if their once-open minds have been seized by conspiracies or political extremism.

Is the unusual heat of this summer the reason why so many people don’t move like they usually do? Or have the pod people taken over their bodies? Are the people we encounter online real humans, or digital replicants, created by AI? And are those really conservative Supreme Court justices who keep taking away our rights over our own lives and bodies, or just pod people in black robes?

The pod people don’t want us to ask these questions. “Don’t be trapped by old concepts, Matthew,” says one pod person to the health inspector in the 1978 film. “You’re evolving into a new life form.”

But the power of body snatchers stories is more than metaphorical. These movies are also straightforward stories of local officials just trying to do their jobs against overwhelming odds. And that’s the really scary thing: our local governments are nowhere near strong enough to protect us from planetary threats—be they climate change, disease, or even pod people from outer space.

The trend lines on local power aren’t good. The second time the body snatchers showed up, in 1978, was also the year that voters passed Proposition 13, taking taxing power from California’s local governments. Today, those governments, after flailing through the pandemic, are even weaker. Local health departments have been gutted, and our municipalities are unable to solve, or even much reduce, persistent homelessness.

In the final scene of the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the health inspector Bennell walks toward the San Francisco City Hall, that domed symbol of self-government. The audience thinks he might be going to help the few humans who have hidden themselves in the city. But it turns out that the health inspector’s own body has already been snatched, and the Bay Area’s remaining humans must survive on their own.

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The panel did not debate whether or not alien life is “out there,” but rather adopted the premise in order to explore universal questions surrounding first contact. The conversation hit notes of optimism and despair, but all panelists agreed on some common refrains: that our imaginative strength is a vital source of inspiration for extraterrestrial exploration, that the alien arrival may present an opportunity to learn more about ourselves, and that humanity would need to come together in order to meet the moment.

The first question from New York Times national security reporter Julian E. Barnes, the evening’s moderator, cut to the chase: What would first contact be like—and would it go well or very, very badly?

Arizona State University astrobiologist and theoretical physicist Sara Imari Walker offered an entirely different scenario, one that requires a go-inward response. “I don’t think we’re going to discover alien life until we understand what life is,” she said. She believes first contact will be with aliens we make in a lab. We “need to build ‘planet simulators’ to simulate what life on other worlds would be like,” akin to the particle accelerators built to simulate the Big Bang, she said.

Physicist Corey Gray of LIGO Hanford Observatory, a member of the Siksika Nation (Northern Blackfoot) of Alberta, Canada, cited historical precedent: “Blackfoot people have had that experience of first contact and it didn’t go well for us.” He also brought up the film Arrival, based on Ted Chiang’s novella “Story of Your Life,” highlighting how difficult communication would be, and how hard it would be to recognize any signal from other life trying to make contact.

Afrofuturist writer Sheree Renée Thomas also brought up Chiang’s story, in addition to other fictional accounts, like Octavia Butler’s Dawn, that use first contact as a metaphor for terrestrial difficulties. “I think that first contact requires us to relate to each other differently than we do right now,” she said, which is “quite a challenge given our history.”

As they discussed the various facets of humanity that could obstruct a smooth and peaceful first contact, Barnes, the resident pessimist of the group—self-professed “more Scully than Mulder”—pushed on the point. If we were able to make contact with good aliens offering good technologies, could we even be trusted with it? Wouldn’t we make a mess?

Thomas sees promise in the stories science fiction tells: “Most sci-fi is moving past this concept of if they’re out there to how are we actually going to change in the meeting.” She hoped out loud that the aliens would not mimic the movies’ violent colonial alien forces—a projection, she says, of humans’ own colonial past. She hopes that aliens instead would have a deus ex machina effect on humankind. Whereas, it used to be “Y’all need Jesus!” she said, it’ll be “Y’all need aliens!” she added, to the audience’s delight.  

Both Gray and Walker echoed her optimism. “Contact with alien life could be something that helps us and makes things better,” Gray said.

Illustration by Soobin Kim.

The conversation then moved from science fiction to science, with all the panelists agreeing that there is a strong synergy between the fields. Gray said sci-fi inspired a lot of his colleagues to work in science. He recounted a moment in his young adulthood when, after watching a movie, he and his friend went out to a remote area in the middle of the night, looked up at the sky, and screamed for the aliens to take them.

“Humans love a sense of wonder,” said Thomas. “We are deeply curious. But we also want to connect with something greater. We want to believe [that] in that darkness there is something.”

But, Barnes, asked: What if we’re alone?

Everyone agreed it was possible. “I definitely think sometimes we’re alone,” Thomas said. “I’m also one of those people that think it’s already here and it’s just moved on. […] Why would they need to engage with us?”

Barnes then, drawing on his reporting of Pentagon reports of “unidentified aerial phenomena,” took the opposite extreme: Is it more likely that they’re here and already watching us?

No, said Walker. “Why would aliens in our 4-billion-year history decide to visit the United States with rapid succession for the last 70 years?” she asked. “There’s just no consistent narrative there.”

Suggesting aliens exist presents narrative dangers, Barnes agreed. “Are we enabling conspiracy theories on Earth? How do we think and talk about these things in a way that doesn’t undermine our society and democracy, but solves the big questions of humanity?”

“That’s tough,” Thomas said. “You’re asking: How do we do something for humans and then have them not behave like humans?” Walker, in response, urged us to accept the limits of our knowledge: “I think it would be helpful if we could embrace the unknown as the unknown.”

The floor opened to audience questions, including a flurry from the very active online chat. One in-person audience member asked about the difference between “alien” and “extraterrestrial,” and what exactly “intelligent life” entails. Thomas and Walker both said these distinctions are cultural and even arbitrary. Ancient and indigenous knowledge recognizes non-human life as autonomous, sacred, and sentient, said Thomas. Walker noted that it’s a question of value: Many people may not value a microbe as they would a “little green man.”

As the discussion came to a close and the reception buzzed with a persistent curiosity (but no UFOs), it was evident that these far-reaching questions—with answers light years away—served as an opportunity to connect us Earthlings to one another, at least for one evening.

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The most memorable taxi ride of my life occurred when I stepped into a cab driven by a man named John, back in 2016. We fell into a conversation about our lines of work. He told me how much he enjoyed his job. As a taxi driver, he got to meet the wonderful menagerie of humankind and find out their life stories—and be paid to do it, no less. And I described my day as a working astrobiologist: how I try to use instruments to detect the signs of living things on other planets, either their fossil remains, or the parts of cells that are alive and well today.

At the mention of extraterrestrial life, John glanced at me in the rearview mirror, a glimmer in his eyes. “I wonder,” he mused. “Could there be alien taxi drivers out there?”

At first the notion struck me as bizarre, even slightly ridiculous. But then I realized that it was a sweeping and rather profound question. His inquiry got to the heart of humanity’s undying fascination with “little green men” from the great beyond. Is it inevitable that some chemical soup on a distant world will always make the long and slow trek to becoming an intelligent creature driving a taxi? And why does this fascinate us?

Extraterrestrials have had an enduring pull on humankind for as long as we have been able to envision them. In the 16th century, Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno imagined planets with superior beings, orbiting distant stars. This heresy contributed to him being burned at the stake in 1600 by the Catholic Church. French writer Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle stirred the drawing rooms of 17th century Europe with his Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, in which, over six moonlit evenings, a French marquise discusses intelligent life on the Moon with a philosopher friend.

Less than 100 years later, American astronomer Percival Lowell convinced himself that he could see canals on the surface of Mars; his now-debunked theory held that extraterrestrial engineers who were frantically working to save their cities from the desiccating encroachments of the Martian desert had constructed the waterways. Around the same time, English writer H.G. Wells published The War of the Worlds, about a Martian invasion on Earth. The heady mix of Lowell’s real (and speculated) observations and Wells’ interplanetary malefactors gripped the Victorian mind.

Today, we have far superior telescopes and spacecraft that can explore other worlds up close. We know much, much more about the composition of our solar system, down to the strange frigid methane seas of Saturn’s moon Titan and the details of the brown and red-mottled surface of Jupiter’s ice-encrusted moon Europa. And we’ve yet to find any Martians, or other type of space creature; if we do find life in our own solar system, we now know that it might be nothing more than microbial slime, with which there is no possibility of ever exchanging a word with—let alone hail a ride.

Still, the fascination with alien life has not abated.

Instead of artificial waterways, scientists now look for microscopic ancient fossil remains on Mars, scooping up rocks with vehicles such as NASA’s Perseverance rover, currently meandering across a primordial muddy delta once settled out from the waters of a vast lake. Astronomers also turn powerful telescopes toward distant planets orbiting other stars. The new James Webb Space Telescope, with its superlative powers of detection, can look for gases in those distant planetary atmospheres, such as carbon dioxide. In the future, advances in technology will allow us to search even further for the more difficult-to-detect oxygen gas, that by-product of the sunlight-capturing activity of plants and algae, a potential tell-tale signature of life in the cosmos.

Our popular culture is full of aliens too—from the adorable and vulnerable E.T. to the exquisite predatory malfeasance of Alien. Even the microscopic crystals of the Andromeda Strain, replicating in their insouciant and threatening way, having crashed to Earth in a satellite, managed to grip our attention.

My conversation with John, my taxi driver, got me thinking about why we unquestioningly consider the notion of alien life inherently interesting. When you really think about it, the extent of our excitement remains something of a mystery. We have many pressing problems on Earth, from environmental challenges to a war in Ukraine. Why, then, do we get so easily distracted by the notion of elusive faraway creatures?

Talking to countless people since, I’ve come to the conclusion that this fascination around extraterrestrials can’t be explained by the minutiae and details of the science. Nor is it some hope for companionship from space. None of us is that enthusiastic about being deposited on a desert island, spending the rest of our time in solitude, but I don’t think we worry about whether we might be stuck on desert island Earth.

So, if it has nothing to do with bamboozling us with science, or assuaging our loneliness, why do we want to find aliens?

The only answer I’ve been able to come up with is the ineffable sense of wonder they offer us. It’s a heady mixture of the familiar—the idea of living things, like us, grappling with their situation in the universe and the problems of existence—with the ethereal, the excitement of something unexpected, different, new, maybe a frisson of trepidation.

This may explain why, though we would all prefer an encounter with talkative aliens like you and me, we could also get excited about finding some humble microbes on a planet like Mars, just doing their thing in the dirt, trying to get by in their unconscious unthinking way. They, too, would offer some sort of contact with an unpredictable living entity.

That sense of wonder about what’s “out there” may offer us temporary reprieve from earthly problems, a type of escapism that prevents us being constantly swamped by bad news. And as we can all appreciate the interest in alien life, there may even be something of a coming together of human minds across cultures and nations when we all turn our eyes and minds to places and creatures beyond Earth.

I don’t know if any of us alive today will ever get to witness the exhilaration of humanity’s first contact with aliens. But perhaps we don’t need to. Perhaps the mere thought of creatures out there waiting to be contacted is enough to draw us out of our everyday concerns and fill us with that sense of innocent awe and anticipation of what the universe might teach us.

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For her Zócalo sketchbook, Kethevane presents us with a new series of her figures, called Voiceless. Her alien-like entities are recomposed from organic or mineral elements, archaeological fragments or objects. They appear to us isolated in a void, making them intentionally difficult to situate in space and time.

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We may not have to wait long. It looks increasingly possible that our search for signs of simpler forms of life in the universe could bear fruit in the next few decades. The discovery of even microbial alien life would be profound, would tell us that life on our planet is not such a fluke, that perhaps intelligent aliens may yet lurk in one of the star systems in our corner of the galaxy.

The search for life in the universe is the central question of the field of astrobiology and drives much of NASA’s science. As an astrophysicist and astrobiologist, this search is the impetus behind my research, too. NASA is actively seeking life beyond Earth on two fronts: around exoplanets (planets orbiting other stars) and within our solar system. Missions like Kepler, the James Webb Space Telescope, and their successors will find Earth-like exoplanets, measure the infrared wavelengths of starlight blocked by these exoplanets’ atmospheres, and possibly detect the presence of gases like oxygen and methane that could indicate life. (The oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere arises from photosynthesis, and the methane from anaerobic bacteria.)

I lead a NASA-funded research team at Arizona State University focused on understanding geochemical cycles on newly discovered exoplanets, ranking them for follow-up observations based on whether oxygen and methane actually would indicate life. (Disclosure: ASU is a partner with Slate and New America in Future Tense.) Simultaneously, robotic exploration of Mars may reveal fossilized algal mats or even present-day bacteria. Jupiter’s ice-covered moon Europa has a subsurface ocean believed capable of supporting life. Ellen Stofan, chief scientist at NASA, speculated in 2015 that we may find definitive evidence of alien life in the next 20 to 30 years.

Science may reveal the presence of alien life in the next few decades, but it cannot predict how we will react to the news. Fortunately, movies let us imagine the aftermath. Granted, most films deal with intelligent alien life and their motives. In the standard tropes, aliens show up to abduct us (Communion, Fire in the Sky), threaten us with extinction if we don’t change our ways (The Day the Earth Stood Still), or simply blow us up for fun (Predator) or profit (War of the Worlds, Independence Day). Some movies examine human society using aliens as proxies for the underrepresented (Alien Nation, District 9). But Arrival, based on the short story “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, is unique in its use of aliens as a mirror held up to humanity. Most of the story is not about the heptapods and what they do; it’s about our reactions to their existence and our reactions to each other.

The aliens in Arrival show up on Earth with a mission to give humanity a technology of sorts. Is it a tool? A weapon? Scientist/linguist Louise Banks, played expertly by Amy Adams, has to figure this out as part of what is, at first, an international collaboration. Through logic, insight, creativity, and experimentation—in other words, the scientific method—she deciphers the heptapods’ language and secrets. As she does, the rest of the world reacts strongly to the new knowledge and who should learn it. Some of the resistance is to the aliens, and such paranoia is not difficult to understand in light of real-life statements by Stephen Hawking, who warns us that if aliens call we should be “wary of answering.”

But in the film, the strongest distrust is reserved for other humans. Military leaders suspect the aliens mean to divide and conquer us, and in a self-fulfilling prophecy the international collaboration falls apart, leaving humanity on the brink of global conflict.

It is remarkable how little the story is about the heptapods and how much it is about us. The heptapods do not instigate action, they do not react violently, and they literally rise above the conflict. The most pertinent fact about them is not that they are intelligent but that they exist. Even the technology they offer is morally neutral. Like any new knowledge, it is neither tool nor weapon—just information. The heptapods represent science, and Arrival shows us that humanity will react to alien life the way it reacts to other scientific discoveries.

Humans have a strong instinct to remain unperturbed by new information, and most discoveries that scientists consider fundamental and profound do not challenge that habit. Society has not changed because we know of the Higgs boson, or dark energy, or superconductivity. Evidence of even microbial alien life would be the crowning achievement of any scientific career. Whoever finds it would join Newton, Einstein, Watson, and Crick in the scientific pantheon. But scientific celebrity wouldn’t automatically make it matter to the public.

Sometimes, though, science produces new findings so profound we can’t ignore them. We can’t stop talking about them, because they make us reconsider who we think we are. Nicolaus Copernicus figured out in 1543 that the Earth orbits the sun, but even now there are websites arguing we on Earth are at the special place at the center of the universe. Clair Patterson figured out in 1956 how to use radioactivity to measure the ages of rocks and determined the Earth is 4.54 billion years old.

Sixty years later, a creationist has built a theme park to convince you the Earth is one-millionth as old and that the universe has existed entirely in that short, special interval of time that people have recorded their history. And we seem to have an endless capacity for reaction to Charles Darwin’s discovery of natural selection and evolution, which he published in On the Origin of Species in 1859. From the 1925 Scopes trial to disputes over textbook selections by the Texas State Board of Education, it is clear we are still processing this scientific discovery.

Humans have a strong instinct to ignore scientific findings, until those discoveries challenge the stories we tell each other about ourselves. And finding life—even simple, microbial life—outside of Earth would very much alter how we think about ourselves. It would imply that we are not alone, and it would call into question how special we think we are. Probably not just the larger meaning, but the very fact of the discovery would be debated on websites, and at theme parks, and in textbooks for many decades. Because the discovery of alien life would force us to examine who we think we are.

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The signal, which only came to public attention in late August, may be a product of interference from Earth or have some other non-alien origin—it’s only been observed once, for four seconds, at a single location. Even though the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence believes the signal to be from Earth and says the likelihood that it is an extraterrestrial attempt at contact “is not terribly promising,” the imagination runs wild—maybe aliens are reaching out to us, perhaps the Kremlin is in cahoots with them, or maybe this is more evidence of governmental cover-ups and conspiracies.

The lack of verifiable evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence forms the basis of the Fermi Paradox. Given the high probability of intelligent life elsewhere, based on the billions of sun-like stars in the Milky Way (not to mention other galaxies), and the likelihood that planets orbit at least some of these stars, and life exists on at least some of these planets, the silence seems strange. In 1950, physicist Enrico Fermi reasoned that aliens should have already contacted Earth, leading him to ask, “Where is everybody?” Nicola Tesla suggested using radio waves to look for alien life in 1896 and we’ve been looking ever since. Perhaps intelligent life isn’t common in the cosmos or is still too far away. Perhaps aliens have visited Earth without our knowledge. Or perhaps aliens have intentionally kept their distance.

But what would happen if this signal were proven to come from intelligent aliens? To call it a game changer is an understatement. What would we do? How would we react? Regardless of what this signal turns out to be, it’s also worth thinking about why aliens might attempt to contact us and what they might have already picked up from our transmissions.

Science fiction offers countless thought experiments in response to these questions. In these stories, the knowledge that humans aren’t alone in the cosmos often causes society to unravel. The discovery of intelligent extraterrestrial life would shift paradigms, particularly within certain religions, political systems, and cultures, and those shifts would be messy. Some people might flee or fight, while others welcome an alien species. Perhaps most of all, sci-fi suggests that a signal from an alien life may threaten humankind—not because of anything the ETs might do, but because of the way such a game-changing encounter would highlight and exacerbate existing divisions within humanity, forcing open those cracks. We can’t control what actions aliens might take or what motives might bring them to Earth, but three stories—two novels and one movie—offer compelling guidance about how humans themselves should react to signals from space.

In Close Encounters of the Third Kind, UFOs abduct people, cause electrical disturbances, and attempt to communicate with humans using via a five-note melody. Throughout most of the film, the government denies these occurrences, positioning itself as the voice of reason and authority in the midst of chaos. In one of the film’s most famous scenes, Richard Dreyfuss’ character uses mashed potatoes to construct an image he can’t get out of his mind. His obsession alienates his family, but eventually leads him to Devils Tower, where the spaceship lands. The ship releases people who had been abducted or had gone missing years earlier, all of whom appear both unharmed and unaged, and the aliens appear peaceful and non-threatening.

While it’s never entirely clear why the aliens abduct humans, their benevolent nature suggests curiosity, and since it can no longer deny their existence, the government sends 12 officials to board the ship, but in the end, the aliens permit only Dreyfuss to accompany them to their home world. As in Spielberg’s subsequent film E.T., the aliens aren’t the villains—if anything, the government that chooses not to believe its citizens and to withhold the truth is. The aliens underscore this point by opening their doors only for a true believer, as though humans must prove themselves worthy of aliens, rather than the other way around.

In Carl Sagan’s 1985 novel Contact, humans receive from the star Vega a transmission consisting of prime numbers, which astronomers eventually decode into a visual message—Adolf Hitler commencing the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. The Vegans had been monitoring adjacent planetary systems and sent back the image of Hitler—the first indication of intelligent life (oh, the irony) from Earth that the aliens were able to pick up. They beamed the message back in receipt. “What are they going to think of us?” wonders astronomer Ellie Arroway, worried about Hitler serving as Earth’s “ambassador.”

Later, one of the Vegans—a simulacra of Arroway’s father—explains why they made contact upon receiving the broadcast:

The picture, of course, was alarming. We could tell you were in deep trouble. But the music told us something else. The Beethoven told us there was hope. Marginal cases are our specialty. We thought you could use a little help. … You’ve got hardly any theory of social organization, astonishingly backward economic systems, no grasp of the machinery of historical prediction, and very little knowledge about yourselves. Considering how fast your world is changing, it’s amazing you haven’t blown yourselves to bits by now. That’s why we don’t want to write you off just yet.

Imagine what extra-terrestrials would discern about human civilization if they detected one of our transmissions. What would they pick up? BBC broadcasts? Talk shows? Fox News? Cartoons? What would they conclude about humanity based on those glimpses of our culture?

Before he wrote Contact, Carl Sagan chaired a committee tasked to decide what to include on the “Golden Record,” a copper disc carried by the Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977. (Voyager 1 is now beyond the solar system.) The Golden Record contains 115 images and sounds, including music, animal calls, greetings in 55 different languages, human brain waves, and images of DNA, the Solar System, maps, humans, and wildlife. This carefully curated time capsule could serve as a helpful introduction to the human race—depending on who or what receives it.

Might aliens determine, based on our signals, that they don’t want contact with earthlings? Might they see them as a call for help? In Liu Cixin’s 2008 book The Three-Body Problem, a disillusioned astrophysicist transmits a message into outer space asking for assistance. The message is picked up by the Trisolarans, aliens looking to settle a planet with a stable orbit. The responder warns that its race will invade Earth, but the astrophysicist figures nothing could be worse than the havoc humans have wrought on the planet, so she persists. Some humans plan defense strategies, while others welcome the alien overlords. These opposing factions spend centuries attempting to outwit one another, each trying to save Earth.

In Contact, Sagan also explores the fracturing of the human race in the aftermath of the discovery that humans aren’t alone. International politics become a free-for-all, as astronomers from around the world work to harness and decode the signals amid fears that countries with tepid relationships with the U.S. might withhold or alter data. America and Russia compete to build the spacecraft depicted in the transmitted blueprints. International debate rages over who will comprise the five-person crew and countries trade seats for other privileges. The heightened tensions culminate in the bombing of the first craft and crew, for which dozens of international political, religious, and military organizations take credit. The schism between science and religion manifests in distrust. Arroway consults a religious leader who asserts that the “scientists and the politicians and the bureaucrats are holding out” on and deceiving them. “Do you want people like that to decide the fate of the world? … Do you want a pack of unbelievers to do the talking to God?” he asks.

Sagan brings up a good and difficult question that could easily get lost in the furor over proving the origin of an extraterrestrial signal. Who should serve as ambassadors for the human race in the event that aliens want to communicate?

Close Encounters, Contact, and The Three-Body Problem offer answers here. They suggest that the curious and open-minded humans make the best liaisons. Our earthly ambassadors should be people who embrace the unknown, believe the impossible, and who don’t shy away from the crucible of alien contact despite its dangers. Perhaps it’s a moot point—we may have unwittingly picked our intergalactic liaisons already. The prospect of intelligent life requires that we consider our legacies not just on Earth, but throughout all space and time, just in case.

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