It's a beautiful night.
Just you, a bottle of wine
and your partner
drifting through the cosmos in a UFO.
As your caress their green skin,
you know that tonight's the night
you're mating with an alien.
OK, so maybe an intimate alien encounter
wouldn't work out that way.
But if you believe the statistics,
According to these victims,
the experiences were intrusive
and horrifying.
Why would an alien want to mate with a human?
Well, if these aliens wanted
to settle on Earth,
interbreeding could speed up the process.
Yeah, the child would have the best of both worlds.
Combining our DNA could create a hybrid being that could survive
in the hottest climates.
And maybe your kids
would get the intelligence of an alien.
They flew across the Universe in a tin plate,
they have to be a little bright.
But even if your offspring became a genius,
Hybridization occurs when two different species breed.
And it's more common than you might think.
We cross-breed fruits
and animals all the time.
But this isn't like your mom's Labradoodle.
You would be mating with a being from another galaxy,
Well, first, forget the wine and dine scenario from before.
The only way you could mate with E.T.
would be through artificial insemination.
After all, all of our parts may not be compatible.
So whether your seed was placed
in an alien or vice-versa,
medical procedures would be the only way
to bring your child into this world.
Unfortunately, the real threat to this kid's health could lie within you.
Sometimes a mother's blood can produce
antibodies that destroy their baby's blood cells.
In humans, we call this condition rhesus disease.
Introducing a completely different
blood type and DNA into a human mother
could trigger their immune system to reject
this perceived alien intruder.
And if their body kept the baby alive long enough to fully form,
the next challenge would be getting it out.
A childbirth with human babies
can be difficult enough.
A hybrid birth would definitely cause complications.
To keep the baby hybrid
and its mother safe during labor,
doctors would have to perform a caesarian section.
Yeah, those big grey heads aren't getting through a birth canal.
Provided those are some of the physical features your baby would have.
The first generation of hybrids would still
look like their alien side of the family.
But the second generation could look
so close to humans you may not
even tell the difference.
They might be able to blend into a crowd,
although our entire society could change
with aliens walking among us.
And this may not be the first time humans
have mated outside our species in modern history.
Yeah, rumors still float around about
Florida scientists who artificially inseminated a chimpanzee
with human DNA in the 1920s.
While we may never know the truth behind this experiment,
were it true,
this humanzee would have been an ethical nightmare.
Cool name, though.
A human-alien hybrid could hold
the answer to our survival on
a changing Earth or even beyond the stars.
The cultural and physical differences might
be too much to accept at first.
Remember, we all still carry the genes
of Neanderthals in our DNA,
the last traces of this long-extinct species
that lived alongside humans
tens of thousands of years ago.
But hey, we got over that problem.
So what if you mated with a Neanderthal instead?
Well, pop a breath mint and freshen up
because that's a story for another WHAT IF.