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Interviewing Michael Madsen, the film-maker behind The Visit: An Alien Encounter, for New Scientist<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n Who is looking into what will happen when aliens land?<\/b> In your new film\u00a0The Visit: An Alien Encounter<\/i>, I was most struck by the to-camera contributions of Paul Beaver and Vickie Sheriff, former Ministry of Defence personnel in London<\/b>. They seemed to have a very clear idea of what would happen if we were visited by aliens and how to handle them. How did that make you feel?<\/b> So was Sheriff more worried by people than by extraterrestrials?<\/b> One of your interviewees, Jacques Arnould, a French theologian, said that when we\u2019re confronted with something alien we need to treat it like a human. Do you agree?<\/b> Why can\u2019t we be objective?<\/b> Why do aliens so disturb our reality?<\/b> What\u2019s wrong with that?<\/b> And there\u2019s hope in the fact that we conjure up aliens in the first place. We long to be seen by something other than ourselves, because then our own existence is strengthened. Alongside it is this suspicion that perhaps the alien is resting inside ourselves: that while we\u2019re alone in the universe, we don\u2019t truly know who we are.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Interviewing Michael Madsen, the film-maker behind The Visit: An Alien Encounter, for New Scientist. Who is looking into what will happen when aliens land? An extraordinary number of people have considered this seriously: staff at the UN Office for … Continue reading
\nAn extraordinary number of people have considered this seriously: staff at the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs, legal sources, NASA personnel, space scientists, former military representatives, and experts in space communications and engineering.<\/p>\n
\nTo be frank, I found it strangely reassuring to find such highly professional people in charge of the political machinery. Politicians may come and go, but civil servants are around forever.<\/p>\n
\nThe most frightening aspect for me was Beaver\u2019s sense of how public panic would cause society to break down. I thought panic leading to Armageddon was just a Hollywood clich\u00e9, but the MoD officials I spoke to had seen this process under way during the Bosnian conflicts of the mid-1990s. Their assumption \u2013 that society tips into anarchy very quickly \u2013 was deadly serious and sincere. Beaver and Sheriff told me, more or less, that the varnish of society is very thin: fear cuts through it quickly.<\/p>\n
\nShe knows how to balance risks. If such advanced beings meant us harm, they would have harmed us by now. She\u2019s much more worried that we would harm peaceable aliens by making mistakes.<\/p>\n
\nI think he was getting at something deeper. Society\u2019s varnish is our willingness to treat each other as beings like ourselves. If you want to communicate with aliens, you have to invest them with human characteristics, because where else do you even begin? The same applies to how you treat other people.<\/p>\n
\nThat\u2019s the promise scientific thinking has been holding out to us since the Renaissance: that the world can be understood, and that we can command the world through our understanding of it. In this, our present way of thinking is perhaps just as dogmatic as religious thinking in the Middle Ages, which only permitted certain ways of perceiving and thinking about reality. Meeting a true alien would challenge our assumptions. Before us would be a dynamic agency utterly unknown to us.<\/p>\n
\nBecause there\u2019s this gulf between a scientific understanding of life and the way we experience it. In the film I asked Christopher McKay, an astrobiologist with the NASA Ames Research Center, if life was blind to everything beyond its own survival. He said yes, life just wants to live. A human being, in trying to extract amazing knowledge from the universe, is just doing what living things do. It\u2019s investing in its future. It\u2019s expanding.<\/p>\n
\nNothing. But it\u2019s not enough. It doesn\u2019t include the fact that we experience life through emotions, dreams and feelings. Towards the end of the film, Chris Welch, of France\u2019s International Space University, imagines entering an alien craft. His thought experiment expresses extraordinary courage and open-mindedness. I hope we can bring such an attitude to an alien encounter if it happens for real.<\/p>\n