Alright Dean.
They're sad because they think that
we don't like them.
It really depends on how long they've been evolving.
That's an alien.
Aliens have noses?
There's no right answer, since no one really knows.
But we often imagine
extraterrestrials to look a certain way, because we've encountered them in books,
films, or on TV shows.
Oh my god, it's one of those facehuggers from the Alien movie.
Which means that when we think about aliens, we're usually
thinking about the product of someone else's imagination.
This is the first
film featuring life out in space: A Trip to the Moon by Georges Méliès.
It came out in 1902 and the strange moon aliens in it are not at all that strange.
They actually look a lot like us.
These creatures were incredibly ambitious at
the time, but they were also convenient.
This is Charlie Henley, an Oscar-nominated
visual effects supervisor who worked on Ridley Scott's Alien series. So yeah, he
spends a lot of time thinking about aliens.
Obviously sometimes it's just like, well, we'll dress somebody up.
So they're gonna end up with a head and arms and legs, you know?
The idea's that they would relate to
us if they're intelligent, so we'd be kinda similar.
We don't have any reason to believe that they would look anything like us. The form of
a human being is the result of several billion years of evolution. There's no
reason to believe that the development of life would be so similar as it was on Earth,
that the sort of the form of life would look anything like we have on Earth.
That's Andrew Siemion, the director of SETI Institute where they
conduct experiments to detect extraterrestrial technology.
We're lucky
in that we don't have to think too much about the biological organism, the
specifics of the life that created the technology, because we just search
directly for the technology and then we use that
a proxy for the existence of life.
But imagining alien organisms, especially
ones with relatable features, is what feeds a popular theme in science fiction:
the relationship between us and them.
There's always a point of contact, an
interaction that's sometimes hostile and other times it leads to a warm and fuzzy relationship.
And that's made for some powerful storytelling.
Are they good or
are they bad?
What would we do if they try to communicate with us?
I think those are their names.
So what are we gonna call them?
Science fiction has stuck around as a major Hollywood genre for decades, with more
advanced visual effects technology in recent years, filmmakers had more room to
experiment with the alien form.
But even with the right tools it can be hard to
break out of what we already know.
Normally there's a bit of a history for the film, there's
some DNA that you want to follow. For example the Neomorph in the new
Alien is effectively like a new creature that Ridley wanted to create,
but it had the DNA of the original alien, so obviously features relate to that.
That connection creates a strong sense of nostalgia for franchises like
Alien, but sometimes when creators break away from that DNA, that leads to new forms.
In The Edge of Tomorrow, there's a creature called a "Mimic" and we did some
design work for that originally.
But the brief for that was it shouldn't be humanistic
obviously and it should follow the normal laws.
And that's a difficult task for filmmakers.
But the challenge with anything like that is that if it doesn't follow the laws that we know,
They need to come up
with something totally new, but also have it makes sense to us.
Often, the trick is to find inspiration in nature.
For example, the Neomorph, we
referenced these Goblin sharks which are quite rare, found in the deep sea and
they have a particular quality to the skin, but also just the mechanism
of how their mouths open.
Or the ink-squirting Heptapods in Arrival: they're
otherworldly but still familiar.
And even Groot from Guardians of the Galaxy.
Who effectively is an alien, but you know not in any classical sense.
Like he was kind of made...
like he's made out of a tree.
The design brief there is to make him
friendly, but also figure out the technicalities of how it's gonna work.
These aliens come from someone else's imagination and they might not be
entirely rooted in science, but the depictions make us think about life
beyond our planet.
We're all sort of wondering about the same thing.
And I think some people draw pictures of it and some people make movies about it
and some people make music about it
and some people talk to their friends and
family and some scientists try to determine the answer using the
principles of basic science and observational astronomy, but it's all
part of I think the same human question.
Which is of course: