Russian billionaire Yuri Milner recently launched a good old fashioned alien hunt by throwing a fat stack of cash into space, and he has Stephen Hawking backing him.
The tech entrepreneur recruited Hawking in his $100 million bid to accelerate the search itself, to add credibility, and possibly to help design an alien-sized butterfly net.
Meanwhile, Nasa has found a planet that is very like our own a mere 1,400 light years away. With all this in mind, surely we are mere weeks away from first contact?
If film and telly are anything to go by – and they are – then aliens are largely malevolent and ruthless. So should Nasa, Hawking, Milner or anyone else succeed in contacting alien life, here’s what we can expect, at least according to Hollywood.
In a War of the Worlds type scenario, there should be enough destruction to cause home abandonment, but not quite enough to cause the complete elimination of humanity. An added bonus of this invasion includes Jeff Wayne's stellar original score that will presumably back the entire occasion.
If the Aliens franchise is to be considered, we should expect intestinal calamity and general depletion of close friends or colleagues. This will render humans free to roam around in underwear until threatened on an individual basis by new alien overlords.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind promotes a strong trend in elusive otherness, but it also makes contributions to interior-design techniques that humans as a species have not yet advanced to. Glowing gaffs and illuminated window spaces will be a hot trend, with wind machines and air vents used to their full potential to create that "just invaded look".
Ender's Game suggests that extraterrestrials will be insect-like, which is a doubly invasive characteristic, and so will heighten incidences of shuddering and standing on chairs. However, Ender's Game deviated considerably from Beckett's original work and the film screenplay concocted a lot of alien jargon that simply wasn't present in the 1957 play. This spurs confidence that the tribe of invasive Formics might not actually show up.
