Experts on What to Do if You Come Face-to-Face With an Alien

Art by Zeke Barbaro / Getty Images

South by Southwest 2024 features over a dozen space-related talks and even more otherworldly-themed film and music showcases. While the brightest minds prepare for the upcoming events, we took it upon ourselves to ask leading experts in the field the hard-hitting questions: How would you interact with an alien? More importantly, how should we interact with an extraterrestrial, should we cross paths with one?

Ada Limón, the 24th poet laureate of the United States, will open SXSW on March 8 with a poem dedicated to NASA’s Europa Clipper mission. The poem, engraved on the spacecraft, will orbit Jupiter after making the 1.8 billion-mile trip. Limón said if she met an alien, she would want to show them the best of humanity and of Earth. She says, “I would hope that an alien would respond to my poem by understanding that, regardless of what they might know of human cruelty and destruction, there is still so much beauty here on Earth, so much wonder, and that there is still hope that we may someday be our best selves living in reciprocity with our planet.”

Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian, Ph.D., filmmaker and designer of experiences at the SETI (aka Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute, is premiering her new film, Doppelgängers3, which explores a utopian community on the moon. If a member of the public encounters an alien, she says, “you should contact your local authorities, councils, and let them know – they will reach out to the experts and us at the SETI Institute once there is evidence that this is indeed extraterrestrial intelligence.”

Christopher D. Impey, a university distinguished professor at University of Arizona, disagrees (we think). “If a member of the public encounters an alien, they should not tell the local authorities, who are fed up and saturated with UFOs and alien sightings,” Impey says. “They should not tell the government, since the Deep State already knows all about aliens. And they should not tell relatives, who might decide to commit them to an insane asylum.”

Impey clarifies if he met an alien, his first concern would be determining whether its diet included human flesh. It should be said that the valediction of his email to us was “tongue in cheek,” so he was either messing with us or resisting the urge to bite back at any flesh-hungry E.T.s.

Savannah Horton, strategic initiatives manager at Aerospace Industries Association, takes a practical approach. “We have no idea what germs or bacteria would be introduced that our human bodies just couldn’t handle,” she says. “Contamination is a very real concern in space policy as we explore further into the solar system, and that goes both ways: I would not recommend touching an alien.”

If she encountered an alien, she said she would be at a loss for words. “I don’t think any aliens, at least how we conceptually think of aliens, are in our solar system,” Horton says. “Though I definitely believe they are in our universe. It would be a statistical improbability for them not to. I think if I encountered an alien I would be truly awestruck. I don’t think I’d be able to do much more than stare.”

Austin hip-hop group Space Goonz is set to perform at SXSW, but what if they met an otherworldly creature before then? Blayce, a member of the group, said they’ve already welcomed an alien to join the group. With that established, Guru Kozy continued, “If the alien isn’t on smoke then we’d teach ’em hip-hop, so we can spread hip-hop throughout the cosmos. If it’s on sight then we’re standing our ground tenfold, cause we’ve been waiting for contact for a minute.”

Out of This World Panels

Space Feminisms: Reimagining People, Planets, & Power

Friday 8, 4pm, Convention Center, Room 9C

Branding Space: The Art of Science Communication

Saturday 9, 10am, JW Marriott, Salon FGH

Predicting Our Future Off-Earth: Beyond the Hype

Monday 11, 11:30am, JW Marriott, Salon D