It is imaginable that humans could at the right time discover aliens. We scour the universe looking for their radio signals, and though we're not accomplished of interstellar space travel, it is remotely conceivable that we could find what we're watching for right here in our solar system.

Voyage Of Discovery

Per Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., the most likely interact scenario is that the alien race we learn will be extremely primitive. This statement is based on reality, given that the livable worlds we're capable of exploring - such as Mars and Europa - show no signs of sheltering advanced beings. But it also makes sense theoretically: Judging by how long inhabitants of Earth spent in the insect like trilobite stage compared with how long individuals have been around, there's a better chance that life found anyplace in the universe will be primitive.

Seven Steps

Despite the bent of Hollywood films and sci-fi novels to depict malicious encounters between evenly matched space enemies, Shostak says the size of the universe and the rarity of life makes it extremely unlikely that two races of roughly equal intellect will encounter one another in the cosmos. That said, reports of UFO sightings led some intellectuals to develop theories about this scenario. They asked: what would we do if we were aliens seeing us?

Alien Overlords

What if, as in the second scenario proposed by Haqq-Misra, we transpired upon a race of aliens who were orders of scale smarter than us - beings capable of interstellar spaceflight who had recognized a base somewhere in our solar system? Just as ants can't make sense of human behavior, it's difficult or impossible for us to understand how this advanced race would react to us. "Carl Sagan figured any aliens that might be able to travel amongst the stars would be so advanced that they would be yonder all this business of violence and war and so forth," Shostak said. "But that may just be a forecast of what he hopes humans would do eventually."

In Haqq-Misra's opinion, "A society proficient of interstellar travel should have resolved their growth issues such that they do not need humans for food."