Do Aliens Exist?

By Jo Franklin, children’s author

 I’m always getting asked at my author events whether I think that aliens exist. I guess it’s a natural question given the title of my book – Help I’m an Alien. I suppose the simple answer is ‘Yes’. The universe is so big, it makes my head hurt thinking about it. I can’t believe that in such a massive expanse of stuff, Earth is the only place where some of that stuff is alive.

 What do aliens look like?

No idea! I don’t think there is any reason why aliens should be humanoid. No other life forms on Earth walks upright on two legs and wears clothes, it’s very arrogant of us to assume that aliens will be like us. Aliens might be blobs that slither along the ground or they might be an intelligent life force that doesn’t have a body at all. Or maybe Ridley Scott was right and all aliens have tentacles and acid for blood. I don’t know, but I believe something is out there. 

3 eyed alien

Three Eyed Alien by Nathan B

Alien Malcolm Dassau

Alien by Malcolm in the middle Dassau

Are aliens here on Earth?

I don’t think aliens exist on Earth like in the film Men in Black. Or that they come to Earth regularly to abduct people like the Returners believe (you’ll have to read Help I’m an Alien to get that reference). I expect that aliens are too busy living their lives on their own planets to bother us.

MIB stick aliens

MIB stick aliens hanging out in the kitchen

 Fictional Aliens

Aliens haven’t been around as part of our cultural psyche for very long. I think that The War of the Worlds by HG Wells published in 1897, was the first alien invasion story. Aliens joined the public consciousness and they were totally mean. War of the Worlds opened the door to all sorts of fictional aliens. In books, magazines, films and TV. Not all aliens are aggressive but Star Wars is based around the Empire trying to take control of the Galaxy and many of the Star Trek stories feature aliens at war with each other even if the original Enterprise mission was ‘to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and civilisations’. Phasers (hand held Star Trek weapons) weren’t always on stun.

Uhura with phaser

Lieutenant Uhura

Spock with phaser

First Officer Spock

But aliens don’t have to be bad.

ET

ET

ET wasn’t aggressive and nor were his family. I’m not sure why they came to Earth or why they left baby ET behind but they weren’t a bad species.
I hope that if life does exist on another planet, humans can nurture and develop our relationship with them. I’m hoping that aliens do know how to teleport things from one place to another in a totally eco-friendly way and will share the technology with us, because I am fed up with traffic jams. They might know the cure for cancer. They probably have really interesting alien sweets and some cool gadgets. Or they might just be really fun mates.

I hope that aliens are good, not bad and that we can live in harmony with them if we ever find each other.

 I love aliens. Especially Chewbacca.

Chewbacca

Chewbacca

 Do you have a favourite fictional alien? Let me know.

 

 

One thought on “Do Aliens Exist?

  1. Anders Rehnberg says:

    Comment to those who say life HAS to exist on other planets because of the vastness of space (100 billion stars per galaxy, 100 billion galaxies, 3 planets per star…)

    Consider this:
    For a monkey to type: “Maybe no other beings in universe” using one key-stroke per second will take the same time as the combined time on all the planets around all the stars in all the galaxies in the universe (4.0E39 seconds or 1.2E32 years).

    Given this, is it really improbable that in a mere 1.2E17 years life has only appeared once???
    Or to put it in another way: to randomly combine 28 letters to form a specific sentence takes 1,000 trillion times as long as the life of the universe (with one letter per second) – how long would it take to put together any form of DNA??????

    Food for thought….?

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