Is anyone out there?
What would happen if we detected evidence of extraterrestrial life?
FIRST CONTACT: AN ALIEN ENCOUNTER Wednesday, 9pm, BBC2 Factual
It’s been the subject of countless movies and sci-fi novels but what would really happen if an alien civilisation made contact with Earth?
This feature-length documentary imagines how that would play out, but while the events are fictional, it contains real interviews with scientists and refers back to genuine historical events.
The film starts with a NASA probe detecting an unusual radio transmission, something that actually happened at the Ohio
State University Radio Observatory in August 1977.
‘It matches many of the hallmarks scientists expect alien signals to have,’ says astrobiologist Dr Jacob HaqqMisra of the 1977 signal. ‘We still have no other explanation for it.’
As shown in the documentary, five days later a telescope detects an unusual object passing the sun, which also really happened in October 2017.
‘It was a visitor from elsewhere in our galaxy. A relic from another planetary system,’ says Dr Karen Meech, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii.
Mayhem
The programme shows how this leads to riots, panic buying, fear and excitement, and a signal is then sent to the planet where the object is thought to originate from.
But, as scientists warn, all efforts to communicate with aliens might be futile as their planet could be over a billion years older than ours, meaning that by the time we receive their signal, their civilisation is already dead.
‘Our attempts to search for extraterrestrial relics is like archeology,’ adds Karen. ‘I hope I’m wrong and the first sign of life is aliens knocking on our doorstep and they are friendly. But I have to be realistic.’