![]() Back in 1999, journalist Leslie Kean was leaked a French dossier on UFOs showing generals and admirals believed the unexplained phenomena could potentially be extraterrestrial. Some governments are taking an interest though. But no policy was adopted, and he was pressed to drop the topic by British diplomats, before being deposed in a coup the following year. A question was raised at a United Nations General Assembly session in 1977 by the prime minister of Grenada, Eric M Gairy, who believed UFO sightings may have been signs of hostile extraterrestrial life on our planet, and suggested establishing an official investigation body through the UN. But there's been little in the way of open international discussion around aliens. Some ethicists are already considering how the rights of a completely unfamiliar alien species would fit into our legal and ethical frameworks. While these laws state that people are supposed to have rights like liberty and freedom from enslavement, afforded to each of us from birth to death, some political philosophers have suggested that in practice, these only really exist on paper. However, except for sanctions, there are limited means to enforce these rights even for humans. The granting of inalienable, universal rights – that is, the rights guaranteed to all people no matter what – were enshrined by the international community into law through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 after the horrors of World War Two. Perhaps that’s because our track record of affording rights to the inhabitants of this planet, human or otherwise, has been so poor throughout history, despite the international legal conventions supposedly safeguarding them. Writers don't seem to have too much hope that humans would treat aliens very well. So with the search ongoing for alien life and the possibility remaining that we encounter it, it's not amiss to consider how we might react if we ever did make contact – especially considering an intelligent alien species is likely to be very different to our own human one. We now know exoplanets are out there, and some are even potential candidates for life because they host water. "It reminds me of exoplanets: as a young researcher, it was a topic we talked about, and we all suspected exoplanets were out there, but there was no way that we'd ever find one because it was technically far too difficult." "Finding life or making contact is always going to be highly unlikely until the day we do ," says John Zarnecki, emeritus professor of space sciences at the Open University in the UK. In any case, anything we find in the near future is more likely to consist of the signs of microbial life that may have once existed on Mars than the humanoids depicted in films and TV shows.īut according to the Drake equation, there’s a decent chance, statistically speaking, that intelligent extraterrestrials are out there somewhere – even if the stars would have to align for us to find and contact each other, given the vastness of our galaxy and enormous distance between planets. ![]() In the 2009 film District 9, millions of alien "prawns" are packed into South African slums – an allegory for human bigotry and cruelty in real life.Įvidence of extraterrestrial life has not yet been found, although we are certainly looking for it. ![]() If it weren't for the intervention of ET's human friend, the titular alien would have been cut open on an operating room table. In popular culture, extraterrestrials are often cast as second-class citizens or less than human. According to many of our cultural touchstones, there’s only one thing for it if extraterrestrials ever take a cosmic detour to our planet: heavy artillery fire.īut from the sugary 1980s blockbuster ET the Extra-Terrestrial and the decades of Star Trek episodes to the books of Isaac Asimov and Ursula K Le Guin, science fiction writers have long wrangled with the question: how would we really treat them?
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