Activity Material

You are handed a small “passport” that extends a channel from our world to an imaginary one, like a message in a bottle cast into the great vastness of space. Out there, somewhere, another being, goes by their life, and maybe from time to time, watches the night sky and wonders too, 

“is anybody out there”?

To help you and / or your child think what a potential alien friend / life-form looks like, I have compiled some examples from contemporary media¹ and scientific literature. If you are a fan of space-themed science fiction, extra warm welcome.

For the Curious

Is Anybody Out There?

There still isn’t scientific evidence that life exists beyond planet Earth. However, it has been an active field of research. Scientists around the world work hard to look for techno-signatures: evidence someone out there is manipulating natural materials, to search for bio-markers: hints of compounds or conditions critical in the history of life on earth. Some, still, are more daring and actively and critically redefine what life really is.

As we chart more and more galaxies and count more and more stars that host planets whirling around, a sentimental argument exists: if it’s just us in all the vast universe, it would really be a big waste of space.

Forces of Necessity

I developed this activity book, as you can infer, soon after watching Project Hail Mary on the big screen. If you haven’t watched it … please skip ahead to the next section.

If you have, though, I hope that you share my awe that Andy Weir and the movie crew realistically portrayed an entirely different alien life, and then have it (him) work with a human to actually solve problems together. There is something reassuring that — as different as we and any potential alien life we meet out there will definitely appear — we are probably bound by the same rules of physics and chemistry. Our number systems will be different but the concepts of numbers will be the same². In different languages, we might ask the same questions about the nature of being.

What I wanted to make clear is, according to our current understanding of the history of life on our own planet, humans are only around because an astronomically rare series of events happened. Our early mammal ancestors bided their time in caves for eons since the age of dinosaurs, the first Hominids were annoyed but never thought much when their East African lush forest homes became grassland, for example. We are a species shaped by our environment, and serendipitously, now on a path to actually understand it.

To me, an alien life form we can hold a dialogue with will necessarily have faced similar challenges, survived, and gone on. That is by the law of nature. In this way life, again, us shouting into the nebulous yonder, share a solidarity that is intrinsic to being.

Aliens All Around

For the first “draw-an-alien” section when I prototyped the booklet, I drew a bird.

I cannot know, yet I look forward to seeing if anybody would do something similar.

Yes, the profile section for such a being will be boring: Star: same as us; planet: same as us; atmosphere: same as us. But isn’t there something strongly alien about the fact that they and we experience the same physical world, but cannot really communicate? Birds, dolphins, ants, we are all like that. Sharing the same pool; aliens to each other.

1. Respective rights of the materials to their owners … ↩︎
2. And that is why this document uses dots for pagination … ↩︎

You can also download a copy of the activity booklet here.