Article
Why Do We Still Need Extraterrestrials?
The alien as a cultural figure in a polarized world where denialism and the far right coexist with cinematic narratives of progress.
We still need extraterrestrials because they let us think about humanity from a distance. In a polarized world, the alien remains a figure for imagining what we share, what divides us and what futures we are still capable of desiring.
Science fiction can be naive, but it can also preserve a difficult possibility: that things could be otherwise. Contact stories, invasion stories and cosmic-horror stories all ask what kind of species we are when faced with the unknown.
The alien is useful precisely because it is unstable. It can be enemy, mirror, messiah, monster or neighbour. Each version reveals a different anxiety about politics, identity, technology or survival.
To keep thinking with extraterrestrials is not to escape the present. It is to illuminate it from the outside. The visitor from space remains one of cinema’s clearest instruments for asking what humanity might still become.