Curiosity (2011) s01e02 Episode Script
Alien Invasion: Are We Ready?
Rodriguez: An alien intelligence Travels across the galaxies Bent on the destruction of humankind.
Let's go! Move! Move! Man : Earth's under attack.
[ woman screams .]
[ growls .]
Think we're safe in our little corner of the galaxy? You think an alien invasion is pure fantasy? For over a century, science-fiction writers, artists, and filmmakers have imagined elaborate alien attacks on Earth.
l should know.
l've been in a few of them.
But the terrifying truth is that the possibility of an alien invasion is not fiction.
We've assembled some of the world's finest minds, the sort of experts who would be called upon in a time of crisis -- physicists, astrobiologists, government advisors, and military strategists.
We've asked them to construct and analyze a scientifically grounded scenario of extraterrestrial invasion to find answers to the impossible questions -- what would happen? How would we fight back? And could we survive? Oluseyi : The idea of an alien invasion, of an alien civilization attacking seems crazy because, basically, the idea of aliens seems crazy.
But the thing is, the idea of an alien, intelligent species living on another planet really isn't that crazy at all.
[ crickets chirping .]
Rothschild : The chance that there is life that originated and evolved elsewhere in other solar systems is certainly possible.
There's a chance that some of that life became intelligent.
Basri : l think there's essentially a 1 00% probability that there's other life, even within our galaxy, certainly in the Universe.
The Universe is extraordinarily huge.
Kaku : ln our own backyard, there are 1 00 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
And our telescopes can see perhaps 1 00 billion galaxies out there.
Do the math.
That's 1 0,000 billion-billion stars.
And to think that we are the only game in town? Come on.
That's the height of arrogance.
Haqq-Misra: Not only do many modern astrobiologists, astronomers, physicists believe that life is prevalent in the Universe, but there are some who believe that we've actually found life already.
ln an isolation chamber at the jet propulsion laboratory, there's this meteorite that was found in Antarctica.
lt fell to Earth 1 3,000 years ago.
Haqq-Misra: This rock comes from Mars, and once they cut into it, they noticed little markings.
They were interpreted as fossils fossilized microbes or fossilized bacteria.
Perelmuter: The evidence is quite compelling that there was a primitive form of life on Mars at some point.
And the consequences are absolutely staggering.
These very primitive life-forms are probably all over the galaxy, and it's probably something that nature does almost in a factory-like manner all over the place.
Baum : Once we recognize that there could be life, even intelligent life in the rest of the Universe, then the question of whether or not there could be an encounter with extraterrestrials stops becoming so silly.
Then the important question is, ''Well, if there is an encounter, what would happen?'' Man : Come take a look at this.
l think it's a new object.
Shostak: Professional astronomers are looking at the sky all the time, and so are the amateurs.
What they're looking for, of course, are big rocks that could, you know, hit the Earth and kind of ruin your whole day.
Those are our distant early-warning system for things that are headed toward Earth.
Beason : A graduate student who's out there on that lonely night reviewing the photographic plate from the telescope would first notice that there's a change in brightness or change in direction of an object.
Man : But the last thing on anyone's mind is that this object they've discovered is a spaceship.
Baum : So, when we see this object coming towards us, pretty much nobody's gonna think that it's extraterrestrials, and they're probably gonna think that it's an asteroid.
Man : Okay.
We're tracking the object now.
Stand by for another update.
The best giveaway that it was an extraterrestrial vessel as opposed to something else would be if it didn't stay on a ballistic orbit -- that is to say, if it seemed to be under the influence of something other than just the gravity in the solar system.
Man : Wait a minute.
The object has changed course.
Kaku : That means that these are piloted vehicles operating under their own energy, not under the laws of free fall.
lt means alien intelligence.
[ siren wails .]
That's when we have a heart attack.
That's when we scientists begin to pee in our pants.
Reporter: We've just gotten some extraordinary information that we are about to [ reporter speaking in native language .]
Reporter #2: think it's important that you know the information coming [ reporter speaking in native language .]
Reporter #3: the object on a collision course with Earth is now believed to not be an asteroid as originally thought.
Sources now believe that the object is, in fact, an extraterrestrial craft.
We have this mental picture that only the top brass of the Pentagon will talk to the President about this information.
That's not how it works.
[ reporter speaking in native language .]
Any astronomer on the Earth can verify the fact that it's guided by alien intelligence, and then the cat is out of the bag.
Man : Okay, what the hell just happened? l'm sitting in front of my computer, and an asteroid story pops up, and they're like, ''Bam, alien spacecraft.
'' A lot of people would go crazy with the idea that we'd finally found the extraterrestrial.
But if aliens really do exist, what do they look like? Everybody would have their own opinion on what it all meant.
There would be both optimistic and pessimistic camps.
You know, you can call them aliens if you want.
l would call them fallen angels.
There are some people who, after all, think that the extraterrestrials are already here, so this would just be, if you will, you know, more visitors for them, and they would say, you know, ''Welcome to Earth.
'' Man : What does it say? Woman : ''Welcome''! lt's beautiful.
l hope that that's a fairly small minority because, in fact, anybody that's coming this way, you really don't know what their intentions might be.
l think that a fairly large fraction of the population would say, ''Well, l think we ought to get some frozen pizza and head for the hills.
'' Man : Uh, Houston, this is Station Space to Ground One.
Come in.
Man #2: Station, this is Houston.
Go ahead.
Yeah, Houston.
We're watching this thing drift into orbit, passing at maybe 200 or 300 miles.
Copy, Station.
Houston, we're gonna go ahead and launch the remote camera.
Deployment in 3, 2, 1 .
Camera away.
Copy, Station.
We're getting the video feed now.
Uh Holy cow, that is big! Weuve: Once we're faced with the reality that an extraterrestrial intelligence has come to Earth, the big question is gonna be ''why?'' Okay, Houston.
Why would they want to head to planet Earth? What would they get out of it? There are some things that you can sort of rule out.
For example, the idea that they might come for our resources, right -- they want our water, they want our, you know, tin or molybdenum or who knows what -- that doesn't make any sense.
Rothschild : To be honest, they would hit Enceladus, which is one of the little moons of Saturn, or Europa, which is one of the moons of Jupiter, first, and they are very obviously covered with ice.
So, they would have all sorts of places that they could stop on the way into the Earth if they were just interested in materials like, say, water.
So, why would they really head to the Earth? lf you're on a planet in a solar system and you know that your star's ultimately gonna go supernova, you might want to try to find another sort of body that you could inhabit.
Shostak: l think we should face the fact that this planet is nicely set up for life.
Comparing the planet that we live on to the other planets we know about in the Universe, this is one of the good ones.
lt seems one of the good ones in terms of having, you know, liquid oceans and a nice, thick atmosphere, and, you know, we have plate tectonics which shake up the surface of the Earth so we can get to some of the good stuff in the Earth's crust.
So, from many points of view, it does seem that our planet is a nice one.
And for those reasons, you could say, ''Well, if they're anything like us, carbon-based life-forms or whatever or something similar to that, maybe they would say, 'Yeah, Earth is a pretty good planet.
''' lf you're a deer in the forest, who do you fear the most? The guy with the shotgun, the hunter, or the developer with a blueprint? Yeah, the hunter looks ferocious.
He can kill you.
But that's not the real danger.
The real danger is, you could be in the way.
That developer may want to put a housing tract right on your feeding area, wiping out not just you but all the other animal life-forms in the forest.
The main danger we face is not that they're gonna want to eat us or mate with us.
We're not gonna be made out of the same DNA.
The main danger we face is that we may get in their way.
We challenged the top minds in biology, military strategies, and astrophysics to predict what would actually take place during an extraterrestrial invasion.
The scenario they came up with is both cataclysmic and possible.
Perelmuter: Most people still hold the view that an alien invasion would be traditional invasion -- shooting down fighter jets and buildings with ray guns.
But it's probably much more sophisticated than that.
First of all, it would be a global attack.
When you invade a planet, you're not gonna be invading the U.
S.
or Russia or Japan because to aliens, we seem like ants.
We're all alike.
What is much more practical is to launch a global invasion.
[ siren wails .]
Second beer! Man : What? Come have a beer! What does it say? Woman : Welcome.
This really is kind of stupid.
l mean, they've only just been hovering out there for a while.
But, remember, the aliens probably don't want to take out the entire planet and everything living on it.
After all, they came all the way across the galaxy to our planet probably because of the biosphere that we have on the planet.
Weuve: They have to take care of us without harming the biosphere in the process.
The way they can do that is to focus on the one thing that we are dependent on that the rest of the biosphere is not, and that's technology.
Reporter: According to military sources, the alien ship has now begun to release small objects that are emitting very high levels of electric-- electrical signal Reporter #2: The spheres seem to be emitting a high-powered EMP -- an electromagnetic pulse.
That's the kind of radio in el-- lf one wanted to shut down the technology part of our civilization -- computers and the electronics -- one way to do that would be to subject the whole Earth to an electromagnetic pulse.
EMP -- it stands for electromagnetic pulse -- is a huge blast of radiant energy.
Kaku : And that radiation is so intense, the electric fields are so great that it short-circuits your electronics.
And it would basically wipe us out in terms of electronics and send us back 1 50 years into the past.
Pacemakers would stop.
Your car might stop.
Most cars have electronic ignitions now, so they would be disabled.
Wouldn't be too good for aircraft, either.
Oh, my God.
[ screams .]
Baum : So, maybe the worst part about an EMP attack would actually be its effect on our communication systems -- our cell towers, radio systems, shortwave radios -- leaving us isolated from each other in ways that we haven't seen for a very long time.
Man : Houston, do you copy? Hey, Jim.
l still can't reach Houston.
Kaku : lf you have two gun fighters about to have a showdown and one gun fighter grabs for sand and throws it in the enemy's eyes, that's the electromagnetic pulse.
You could blind them, and then, at will, you can kill them.
Man : Uh, wait.
There's something else happening here.
What the hell is that? Gannon : Assuming the extraterrestrials launch an EMP attack, how can they follow it up? Possibly one of the most effective follow-ups is an old-fashioned kinetic-energy strike -- hitting us with something hard and fast.
Bartell : This hard and fast object would be accelerated to tens of thousands of miles per hour.
And there wouldn't be just one.
There might be hundreds of thousands of them.
[ beeping .]
Where would they be aimed? At our cities? Probably not.
Baum : What would be dangerous for us is if they knew about the geography of our planet.
About 40% of the human population lives within 60 miles or so of the coasts of our oceans.
Gannon : lf they drop on the continental shelf 5, 1 0, 50 miles out to sea, they will generate waves of a size and destructive force which will go far inland.
lt's estimated that almost 2 billion people live in close enough pro ximity to the coastlines of the world that they would be affected or probably killed.
Washed away, drowned, blasted out of existence by the force of this water.
That's 2 billion people within the first day or even minutes.
Aliens have attacked.
lf you live in cities like New York, Tokyo, Sydney on the coast, then you're already dead.
Those places are gone, washed away.
And if you live inland, you're cut off.
There's no power, no phones.
Cars won't run.
And the worst part is, it's just beginning.
Davis: lmagine people inland -- there are gonna be millions of those people who have no idea what's happened on the coast.
There's no communication.
There's no television.
So they are really ignorant about what's been going on in other parts of the country or the world.
Gannon : So, who's in charge? Well, the government.
But in all probability, its rules are largely being enforced -- and more than ever before -- by the equivalent of a martial law run by the military.
The military has largely evolved, particularly in the last half of the 20th century and into this century as being ready for these kind of situations.
Not extraterrestrials coming down, but after all, what would the aftermath of a nuclear war be like? lt would have many of the same features that we're experiencing now post-attack in this hypothetical scenario where there have been coastal strikes, and all sorts of energy and communication assets have been eliminated.
Bartell : There are some machines that will likely have withstood this EMP attack -- military vehicles that are parked in subterranean bunkers that are designed to withstand nuclear attacks.
There may also be military command centers in protected bunkers that survived the EMP attack, but they wouldn't necessarily be able to communicate with the outside world.
Move! Move! Man : Go! l imagine there would be isolated pockets of regional authorities that would try to organize, communicate with each other, and so on.
Some of them might take the initiative to go and mount a search-and-rescue operation.
But the role of the military at this point is not just keeping order.
There are still perhaps 2 billion people left.
So if the aliens are going to eliminate us completely, they have a lot of work left to do.
The attack might just be beginning.
Hello? Anyone in here? Hello? -- l hear someone down here.
-- Over there.
Oluseyi : War is messy.
lt's hard to imagine that some alien species could stay up in orbit and take potshots at us and still get the job done.
At some point, they're gonna have to come down here to Earth and get their hands dirty.
[ machine-gun fire .]
Move! Move! Let's go! Move! Move! Move! Come on! This way! Man : Move! [ woman screaming .]
Man #2: Come on! [ helicopter blades whirring .]
Man : Dust Off 1 -7 inbound.
Be advised, we have an injured alien en route.
Woman : Copy, Dust Off 1 -7.
CCU will meet you outside.
[ distorted voices speak .]
Man : Whoa, careful, guys.
Man #2: Roll him right through here.
So, when we see these extraterrestrials, maybe they'll be like jelly people or crystal people or beings of pure energy.
Man : [ distorted .]
ls the approaching conscious? Man : Roger, CC.
Dust Off 2-7 out.
But let's take a more conservative approach.
Maybe the chemicals that make up our life are the same chemicals that make up their lives, as well.
[ alarm beeping .]
All right.
lnjury, left lateral.
Roger, CC.
[ distorted voices speaking .]
A shared chemistry presents the possibility that an alien life-form may be more like us than we could ever imagine.
[ growling .]
Rothschild : ln some ways, extraterrestrial life would be likely to resemble us because sometimes there are only so many solutions and there may only be so many building blocks for certain problems.
For example, if you want to be able to live in the air, an obvious solution is to evolve wings.
And, of course, that's what the insects did.
That's what the pterodactyls did.
That's what the birds did.
That's what the bats did.
They don't all come from the same origin, but they've all come up with the same solution to get their bodies up in the air.
l think if they're like us, that could be a bad thing.
We're a very war-like species.
Does evolution transfer culturally? Back up! lf they're like us, that could be a very bad thing.
The world that we know of today is gone, replaced with a madhouse of destruction, as aliens descend on the planet.
What would you do? Would you lose hope? Would you hide? Or would you fight back? [ aircraft passes .]
[ explosion .]
Man : Let's go! Move! Move! Move! [ indistinct shouting .]
[ growling .]
[ screaming .]
During the Cold War, Ronald Reagan met Mikhail Gorbachev and said, ''You know, if the Martians were to invade the Earth, wouldn't you and me get together to fight off the Martians?'' And Gorbachev said, ''Well, yeah.
'' And you know something? l think he was right.
lf the Earth is faced with a common extraterrestrial threat, we would band together.
But what could we do? We could never go head-to-head against a technologically superior civilization.
We could never build the same ships as they could, the same type of weapons.
Employing asymmetric means of fighting against them is really the best and the only way to ensure our survivability.
Asymmetric warfare -- it's one of the most time-honored foundations of warfare.
Read ''The Art of War.
'' Read Clausewitz.
There's all these volumes written in the past about how small, small armies can take on and defeat large armies.
Weuve: One classic example of an asymmetric struggle was the U.
S.
in Vietnam.
We used tanks.
We used airplanes.
We used helicopters.
We had artillery.
But the Vietnam conflict was really about individuals fighting a guerrilla warfare.
You keep the fight going until you make it unprofitable for the larger forces to keep going.
Weuve: ln asymmetric warfare, you don't fight strength on strength.
Something as simple as a homemade explosive device could bring down all these machines, if they're clever enough about it.
Man : Go, go, go, go, go, go, go! [ beep .]
Perelmuter: Well, l think that when it comes to a terrestrial arena, we would do fairly well because that's what armies have been doing since the beginning of times, since people have been fighting.
Oluseyi : We have some good tools for fighting a ground war, but l don't think that that's what this war's gonna be about.
l think, ultimately, this is gonna be a biological war.
[ whirring .]
[ tape rewinding .]
Man : We now have a theory as to what the harvester machines have been doing.
Woman : We believe the captives are being transported to the orbiting craft, where we suspect they are being experimented on for the purpose of creating a biological agent.
The kind of wars that we imagine with extraterrestrials are still rooted in our own thinking.
lf l'm an extraterrestrial, l would just release biological weapons on the Earth that wiped out whatever l wanted it to wipe out and did so in a surreptitious fashion that humans weren't even aware of before it happened.
Simon : l think there's a very clear process for how aliens could create a biological weapon.
The first thing they'd have to do is know something about us.
They'd have to pick up some viruses.
Viruses are all over.
Study the cells that it wants the virus to get into.
For example, if it wants the virus to get into, let's say, the upper respiratory system, it has to have the keys that the influenza virus, the virus that causes flu, has.
You could have a virus that starts out in the upper respiratory tract, kind of hides there for a while.
People would have mild symptoms.
Maybe it's just a little flu, a little cold.
Nothing to get worried about.
And then viruses can do other things.
lf the goal is to kill people Help! l need help over here! Hurry! you would want it to then become much more pathogenic.
Man : Get back! At this point, you'd want the virus to go through the second phase where the virus is moving through the bloodstream.
These are the cells that are attacked by the Ebola virus.
Hurry! Quick! All of the sudden, people who had this virus would start bleeding profusely.
-- So people coming in contact -- Hurry! would all pick up the virus.
[ screaming .]
Forget about lasers, the flying saucers, and the robots.
That's old sci-fi thinking.
When aliens come to kill us, their weapons will be our own bodies.
[ barking .]
Now that they have the perfect biological weapon, how do they introduce that into the human population around the world? Well, our biosphere has ready-made transmission mechanisms already in it.
They're all around us in nature.
Simon : So, if l was an alien who wanted to disseminate this virus rapidly, l'd probably use birds.
[ birds chirping .]
Birds and humans have a very similar respiratory tract, so the birds would be flying around, coughing.
Humans would be picking it up.
lt would be a very quick way to disseminate the virus around.
And quarantines wouldn't help.
l mean, birds are everywhere.
lf you have birds that maybe are carrying the virus in droppings, maybe carrying the virus in discharges, which they're discharging as they're flying, you don't even know it.
That would be a very dangerous situation.
[ monitor beeping .]
[ coughing .]
You'd think that by now Western medicine could take care of any virus that came along.
Unfortunately, that isn't the case.
[ coughing .]
Look at his legs! Once the biological weapon has been introduced, there's a clock ticking towards human extinction.
[ wheezing .]
And even if we survive that, what's to stop them from creating a second or a third pathogen? [ beeping .]
So it's time that we think about a different strategy.
[ choking .]
[ coughing .]
[ rapid beeping, flatline .]
At this point, our only hope might be to try to attack and destroy the alien mothership in orbit.
But this is nothing like anything we've ever accomplished before.
That is the definition of a long shot.
Man : 3, 2, 1 , launch.
Launch, launch.
lgnition.
Do we have the capability of attacking an extraterrestrial spacecraft in space? Certainly, we can attack it.
Guidance is on.
That will be a supersonic.
We do have the capability of firing missiles at such a spacecraft.
Time to impact -- 20 seconds.
The question is, what type of weapon do we launch? Our most powerful weapon currently is the hydrogen bomb.
lt's only about this big, and it's capable of wiping out, for example, the entire New York metropolitan area within a fraction of a second.
Some people think, ''Let's nuke the aliens.
'' Well, it's not so easy.
A nuclear weapon on the Earth creates a shockwave that then travels a little bit faster than the speed of sound, pulverizing everything in sight.
ln space, there is no atmosphere.
There's no medium to transmit the shockwave and the heat wave, so the effect is much diminished.
[ indistinct radio chatter .]
Man : Detonate in 3, 2, 1 , mark.
That was our best shot.
Man #2: No, it's not.
We have one more option.
But it's never been used.
[ beep .]
We've seen what aliens could do to Earth, to us.
But what could we do to them? Based on the analysis of our expert scientists and authors, how could we possibly fight back? [ beeping .]
With nuclear weapons off the table, we'd have to think out of the bo x.
One of the most far-out ideas for attacking an object in orbit was conceived of by Edward Teller in the '50s during the nuclear-test program.
lt's called a thunder well.
So, thunder wells is really just an old concept from the nuclear-weapons days that might be successfully employed against an extraterrestrial adversary.
Thunder wells is using the power of a nuclear weapon to be able to convert that energy into steam, of all things, and then be able to drive that steam as a steam piston to be able to drive tons of material into space.
This was actually discovered back in 1 956.
The story goes that Edward Teller was conducting an underground nuclear blast and that the hole was sealed with a metal plate.
Man : 4, 3 When it was detonated, the explosion was so intense and the pressures were so intense that he blasted the metal plate into orbit.
Zero.
Beason : They calculated the velocity that this was going, and it was six times escape velocity, so it was over 42 miles a second which this plate was going.
You dig a very large 4-meter-diameter hole, say, half a kilometer underneath the surface.
You fill this hole full of water, and at the bottom of the well is, you have a nuclear weapon.
And at the very top, you place a plug and a large match, hundreds of tons of material.
You let off the nuclear weapon.
You explode it.
The gamma rays are absorbed by the water.
Turns into steam near instantaneously.
The steam pushes up and accelerates up through the hole, and it actually accelerates this as a giant piston.
Haqq-Misra: lf we do successfully breach the hull of an alien spacecraft, it could prove very difficult for them.
lf they're interested in Earth because of its atmosphere and its environment, then that may mean that their ship is pressurized, as well, to match the atmosphere of Earth.
So, in that case, a hull breach would cause de-pressurization of the cabin.
lt may not take out the mothership, but it would send an important message to the extraterrestrial invaders, and that is we do have some capability to attack them, and it's not going to be easy for them.
And that's really the point of asymmetric warfare.
lt's not that we're trying to win.
We're just going to show them that we can put up a resistance and it's going to be long and hard for them if they want to keep their presence there.
Bartell : Most of the people in the world would probably be unaware for quite a while.
But to those people who were there and made it happen, the elation they would feel after so many failures and the sudden feeling of having some bit of power, it would be astonishing.
Davis: l think that if we were actually able to score some kind of a victory against the aliens, that would be a huge unifying factor for people.
That really would incite a lot of hope.
Bartell : Rebuilding the world after such an event would be a multi-faceted task involving reestablishing communications and transportation and food production and many other things.
We can't also forget that there was this alien pathogen among us, and we may still be battling that for a long time to come.
[ siren wails in distance .]
Should we spend a lot of time worrying about, considering, preparing for an extraterrestrial invasion of Earth? Well, it hasn't happened yet.
But there's no way of proving that it can't happen.
We have absolutely no idea what we could do about an extraterrestrial invasion.
We'd have to make it up as it went along, assuming we even got the chance to do that.
Kaku : l think it's more a question of our personal fears and personal hysteria that makes us fear the possibility of an invasion from outer space.
But, hey, you never know.
One of the values of a program such as this -- books, any discourse on this kind of topic whatsoever -- is that it sort of draws attention to our vulnerability the fact that we are a very small, precious blue marble in the middle of an immense, immense vastness of space.
And threats can come in many shapes and many forms, some more likely than the other.
How likely is an alien threat? We can't rule it out.
And if it should turn out to be the case, we'll sure wish we'd prepared for it.
Let's go! Move! Move! Man : Earth's under attack.
[ woman screams .]
[ growls .]
Think we're safe in our little corner of the galaxy? You think an alien invasion is pure fantasy? For over a century, science-fiction writers, artists, and filmmakers have imagined elaborate alien attacks on Earth.
l should know.
l've been in a few of them.
But the terrifying truth is that the possibility of an alien invasion is not fiction.
We've assembled some of the world's finest minds, the sort of experts who would be called upon in a time of crisis -- physicists, astrobiologists, government advisors, and military strategists.
We've asked them to construct and analyze a scientifically grounded scenario of extraterrestrial invasion to find answers to the impossible questions -- what would happen? How would we fight back? And could we survive? Oluseyi : The idea of an alien invasion, of an alien civilization attacking seems crazy because, basically, the idea of aliens seems crazy.
But the thing is, the idea of an alien, intelligent species living on another planet really isn't that crazy at all.
[ crickets chirping .]
Rothschild : The chance that there is life that originated and evolved elsewhere in other solar systems is certainly possible.
There's a chance that some of that life became intelligent.
Basri : l think there's essentially a 1 00% probability that there's other life, even within our galaxy, certainly in the Universe.
The Universe is extraordinarily huge.
Kaku : ln our own backyard, there are 1 00 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
And our telescopes can see perhaps 1 00 billion galaxies out there.
Do the math.
That's 1 0,000 billion-billion stars.
And to think that we are the only game in town? Come on.
That's the height of arrogance.
Haqq-Misra: Not only do many modern astrobiologists, astronomers, physicists believe that life is prevalent in the Universe, but there are some who believe that we've actually found life already.
ln an isolation chamber at the jet propulsion laboratory, there's this meteorite that was found in Antarctica.
lt fell to Earth 1 3,000 years ago.
Haqq-Misra: This rock comes from Mars, and once they cut into it, they noticed little markings.
They were interpreted as fossils fossilized microbes or fossilized bacteria.
Perelmuter: The evidence is quite compelling that there was a primitive form of life on Mars at some point.
And the consequences are absolutely staggering.
These very primitive life-forms are probably all over the galaxy, and it's probably something that nature does almost in a factory-like manner all over the place.
Baum : Once we recognize that there could be life, even intelligent life in the rest of the Universe, then the question of whether or not there could be an encounter with extraterrestrials stops becoming so silly.
Then the important question is, ''Well, if there is an encounter, what would happen?'' Man : Come take a look at this.
l think it's a new object.
Shostak: Professional astronomers are looking at the sky all the time, and so are the amateurs.
What they're looking for, of course, are big rocks that could, you know, hit the Earth and kind of ruin your whole day.
Those are our distant early-warning system for things that are headed toward Earth.
Beason : A graduate student who's out there on that lonely night reviewing the photographic plate from the telescope would first notice that there's a change in brightness or change in direction of an object.
Man : But the last thing on anyone's mind is that this object they've discovered is a spaceship.
Baum : So, when we see this object coming towards us, pretty much nobody's gonna think that it's extraterrestrials, and they're probably gonna think that it's an asteroid.
Man : Okay.
We're tracking the object now.
Stand by for another update.
The best giveaway that it was an extraterrestrial vessel as opposed to something else would be if it didn't stay on a ballistic orbit -- that is to say, if it seemed to be under the influence of something other than just the gravity in the solar system.
Man : Wait a minute.
The object has changed course.
Kaku : That means that these are piloted vehicles operating under their own energy, not under the laws of free fall.
lt means alien intelligence.
[ siren wails .]
That's when we have a heart attack.
That's when we scientists begin to pee in our pants.
Reporter: We've just gotten some extraordinary information that we are about to [ reporter speaking in native language .]
Reporter #2: think it's important that you know the information coming [ reporter speaking in native language .]
Reporter #3: the object on a collision course with Earth is now believed to not be an asteroid as originally thought.
Sources now believe that the object is, in fact, an extraterrestrial craft.
We have this mental picture that only the top brass of the Pentagon will talk to the President about this information.
That's not how it works.
[ reporter speaking in native language .]
Any astronomer on the Earth can verify the fact that it's guided by alien intelligence, and then the cat is out of the bag.
Man : Okay, what the hell just happened? l'm sitting in front of my computer, and an asteroid story pops up, and they're like, ''Bam, alien spacecraft.
'' A lot of people would go crazy with the idea that we'd finally found the extraterrestrial.
But if aliens really do exist, what do they look like? Everybody would have their own opinion on what it all meant.
There would be both optimistic and pessimistic camps.
You know, you can call them aliens if you want.
l would call them fallen angels.
There are some people who, after all, think that the extraterrestrials are already here, so this would just be, if you will, you know, more visitors for them, and they would say, you know, ''Welcome to Earth.
'' Man : What does it say? Woman : ''Welcome''! lt's beautiful.
l hope that that's a fairly small minority because, in fact, anybody that's coming this way, you really don't know what their intentions might be.
l think that a fairly large fraction of the population would say, ''Well, l think we ought to get some frozen pizza and head for the hills.
'' Man : Uh, Houston, this is Station Space to Ground One.
Come in.
Man #2: Station, this is Houston.
Go ahead.
Yeah, Houston.
We're watching this thing drift into orbit, passing at maybe 200 or 300 miles.
Copy, Station.
Houston, we're gonna go ahead and launch the remote camera.
Deployment in 3, 2, 1 .
Camera away.
Copy, Station.
We're getting the video feed now.
Uh Holy cow, that is big! Weuve: Once we're faced with the reality that an extraterrestrial intelligence has come to Earth, the big question is gonna be ''why?'' Okay, Houston.
Why would they want to head to planet Earth? What would they get out of it? There are some things that you can sort of rule out.
For example, the idea that they might come for our resources, right -- they want our water, they want our, you know, tin or molybdenum or who knows what -- that doesn't make any sense.
Rothschild : To be honest, they would hit Enceladus, which is one of the little moons of Saturn, or Europa, which is one of the moons of Jupiter, first, and they are very obviously covered with ice.
So, they would have all sorts of places that they could stop on the way into the Earth if they were just interested in materials like, say, water.
So, why would they really head to the Earth? lf you're on a planet in a solar system and you know that your star's ultimately gonna go supernova, you might want to try to find another sort of body that you could inhabit.
Shostak: l think we should face the fact that this planet is nicely set up for life.
Comparing the planet that we live on to the other planets we know about in the Universe, this is one of the good ones.
lt seems one of the good ones in terms of having, you know, liquid oceans and a nice, thick atmosphere, and, you know, we have plate tectonics which shake up the surface of the Earth so we can get to some of the good stuff in the Earth's crust.
So, from many points of view, it does seem that our planet is a nice one.
And for those reasons, you could say, ''Well, if they're anything like us, carbon-based life-forms or whatever or something similar to that, maybe they would say, 'Yeah, Earth is a pretty good planet.
''' lf you're a deer in the forest, who do you fear the most? The guy with the shotgun, the hunter, or the developer with a blueprint? Yeah, the hunter looks ferocious.
He can kill you.
But that's not the real danger.
The real danger is, you could be in the way.
That developer may want to put a housing tract right on your feeding area, wiping out not just you but all the other animal life-forms in the forest.
The main danger we face is not that they're gonna want to eat us or mate with us.
We're not gonna be made out of the same DNA.
The main danger we face is that we may get in their way.
We challenged the top minds in biology, military strategies, and astrophysics to predict what would actually take place during an extraterrestrial invasion.
The scenario they came up with is both cataclysmic and possible.
Perelmuter: Most people still hold the view that an alien invasion would be traditional invasion -- shooting down fighter jets and buildings with ray guns.
But it's probably much more sophisticated than that.
First of all, it would be a global attack.
When you invade a planet, you're not gonna be invading the U.
S.
or Russia or Japan because to aliens, we seem like ants.
We're all alike.
What is much more practical is to launch a global invasion.
[ siren wails .]
Second beer! Man : What? Come have a beer! What does it say? Woman : Welcome.
This really is kind of stupid.
l mean, they've only just been hovering out there for a while.
But, remember, the aliens probably don't want to take out the entire planet and everything living on it.
After all, they came all the way across the galaxy to our planet probably because of the biosphere that we have on the planet.
Weuve: They have to take care of us without harming the biosphere in the process.
The way they can do that is to focus on the one thing that we are dependent on that the rest of the biosphere is not, and that's technology.
Reporter: According to military sources, the alien ship has now begun to release small objects that are emitting very high levels of electric-- electrical signal Reporter #2: The spheres seem to be emitting a high-powered EMP -- an electromagnetic pulse.
That's the kind of radio in el-- lf one wanted to shut down the technology part of our civilization -- computers and the electronics -- one way to do that would be to subject the whole Earth to an electromagnetic pulse.
EMP -- it stands for electromagnetic pulse -- is a huge blast of radiant energy.
Kaku : And that radiation is so intense, the electric fields are so great that it short-circuits your electronics.
And it would basically wipe us out in terms of electronics and send us back 1 50 years into the past.
Pacemakers would stop.
Your car might stop.
Most cars have electronic ignitions now, so they would be disabled.
Wouldn't be too good for aircraft, either.
Oh, my God.
[ screams .]
Baum : So, maybe the worst part about an EMP attack would actually be its effect on our communication systems -- our cell towers, radio systems, shortwave radios -- leaving us isolated from each other in ways that we haven't seen for a very long time.
Man : Houston, do you copy? Hey, Jim.
l still can't reach Houston.
Kaku : lf you have two gun fighters about to have a showdown and one gun fighter grabs for sand and throws it in the enemy's eyes, that's the electromagnetic pulse.
You could blind them, and then, at will, you can kill them.
Man : Uh, wait.
There's something else happening here.
What the hell is that? Gannon : Assuming the extraterrestrials launch an EMP attack, how can they follow it up? Possibly one of the most effective follow-ups is an old-fashioned kinetic-energy strike -- hitting us with something hard and fast.
Bartell : This hard and fast object would be accelerated to tens of thousands of miles per hour.
And there wouldn't be just one.
There might be hundreds of thousands of them.
[ beeping .]
Where would they be aimed? At our cities? Probably not.
Baum : What would be dangerous for us is if they knew about the geography of our planet.
About 40% of the human population lives within 60 miles or so of the coasts of our oceans.
Gannon : lf they drop on the continental shelf 5, 1 0, 50 miles out to sea, they will generate waves of a size and destructive force which will go far inland.
lt's estimated that almost 2 billion people live in close enough pro ximity to the coastlines of the world that they would be affected or probably killed.
Washed away, drowned, blasted out of existence by the force of this water.
That's 2 billion people within the first day or even minutes.
Aliens have attacked.
lf you live in cities like New York, Tokyo, Sydney on the coast, then you're already dead.
Those places are gone, washed away.
And if you live inland, you're cut off.
There's no power, no phones.
Cars won't run.
And the worst part is, it's just beginning.
Davis: lmagine people inland -- there are gonna be millions of those people who have no idea what's happened on the coast.
There's no communication.
There's no television.
So they are really ignorant about what's been going on in other parts of the country or the world.
Gannon : So, who's in charge? Well, the government.
But in all probability, its rules are largely being enforced -- and more than ever before -- by the equivalent of a martial law run by the military.
The military has largely evolved, particularly in the last half of the 20th century and into this century as being ready for these kind of situations.
Not extraterrestrials coming down, but after all, what would the aftermath of a nuclear war be like? lt would have many of the same features that we're experiencing now post-attack in this hypothetical scenario where there have been coastal strikes, and all sorts of energy and communication assets have been eliminated.
Bartell : There are some machines that will likely have withstood this EMP attack -- military vehicles that are parked in subterranean bunkers that are designed to withstand nuclear attacks.
There may also be military command centers in protected bunkers that survived the EMP attack, but they wouldn't necessarily be able to communicate with the outside world.
Move! Move! Man : Go! l imagine there would be isolated pockets of regional authorities that would try to organize, communicate with each other, and so on.
Some of them might take the initiative to go and mount a search-and-rescue operation.
But the role of the military at this point is not just keeping order.
There are still perhaps 2 billion people left.
So if the aliens are going to eliminate us completely, they have a lot of work left to do.
The attack might just be beginning.
Hello? Anyone in here? Hello? -- l hear someone down here.
-- Over there.
Oluseyi : War is messy.
lt's hard to imagine that some alien species could stay up in orbit and take potshots at us and still get the job done.
At some point, they're gonna have to come down here to Earth and get their hands dirty.
[ machine-gun fire .]
Move! Move! Let's go! Move! Move! Move! Come on! This way! Man : Move! [ woman screaming .]
Man #2: Come on! [ helicopter blades whirring .]
Man : Dust Off 1 -7 inbound.
Be advised, we have an injured alien en route.
Woman : Copy, Dust Off 1 -7.
CCU will meet you outside.
[ distorted voices speak .]
Man : Whoa, careful, guys.
Man #2: Roll him right through here.
So, when we see these extraterrestrials, maybe they'll be like jelly people or crystal people or beings of pure energy.
Man : [ distorted .]
ls the approaching conscious? Man : Roger, CC.
Dust Off 2-7 out.
But let's take a more conservative approach.
Maybe the chemicals that make up our life are the same chemicals that make up their lives, as well.
[ alarm beeping .]
All right.
lnjury, left lateral.
Roger, CC.
[ distorted voices speaking .]
A shared chemistry presents the possibility that an alien life-form may be more like us than we could ever imagine.
[ growling .]
Rothschild : ln some ways, extraterrestrial life would be likely to resemble us because sometimes there are only so many solutions and there may only be so many building blocks for certain problems.
For example, if you want to be able to live in the air, an obvious solution is to evolve wings.
And, of course, that's what the insects did.
That's what the pterodactyls did.
That's what the birds did.
That's what the bats did.
They don't all come from the same origin, but they've all come up with the same solution to get their bodies up in the air.
l think if they're like us, that could be a bad thing.
We're a very war-like species.
Does evolution transfer culturally? Back up! lf they're like us, that could be a very bad thing.
The world that we know of today is gone, replaced with a madhouse of destruction, as aliens descend on the planet.
What would you do? Would you lose hope? Would you hide? Or would you fight back? [ aircraft passes .]
[ explosion .]
Man : Let's go! Move! Move! Move! [ indistinct shouting .]
[ growling .]
[ screaming .]
During the Cold War, Ronald Reagan met Mikhail Gorbachev and said, ''You know, if the Martians were to invade the Earth, wouldn't you and me get together to fight off the Martians?'' And Gorbachev said, ''Well, yeah.
'' And you know something? l think he was right.
lf the Earth is faced with a common extraterrestrial threat, we would band together.
But what could we do? We could never go head-to-head against a technologically superior civilization.
We could never build the same ships as they could, the same type of weapons.
Employing asymmetric means of fighting against them is really the best and the only way to ensure our survivability.
Asymmetric warfare -- it's one of the most time-honored foundations of warfare.
Read ''The Art of War.
'' Read Clausewitz.
There's all these volumes written in the past about how small, small armies can take on and defeat large armies.
Weuve: One classic example of an asymmetric struggle was the U.
S.
in Vietnam.
We used tanks.
We used airplanes.
We used helicopters.
We had artillery.
But the Vietnam conflict was really about individuals fighting a guerrilla warfare.
You keep the fight going until you make it unprofitable for the larger forces to keep going.
Weuve: ln asymmetric warfare, you don't fight strength on strength.
Something as simple as a homemade explosive device could bring down all these machines, if they're clever enough about it.
Man : Go, go, go, go, go, go, go! [ beep .]
Perelmuter: Well, l think that when it comes to a terrestrial arena, we would do fairly well because that's what armies have been doing since the beginning of times, since people have been fighting.
Oluseyi : We have some good tools for fighting a ground war, but l don't think that that's what this war's gonna be about.
l think, ultimately, this is gonna be a biological war.
[ whirring .]
[ tape rewinding .]
Man : We now have a theory as to what the harvester machines have been doing.
Woman : We believe the captives are being transported to the orbiting craft, where we suspect they are being experimented on for the purpose of creating a biological agent.
The kind of wars that we imagine with extraterrestrials are still rooted in our own thinking.
lf l'm an extraterrestrial, l would just release biological weapons on the Earth that wiped out whatever l wanted it to wipe out and did so in a surreptitious fashion that humans weren't even aware of before it happened.
Simon : l think there's a very clear process for how aliens could create a biological weapon.
The first thing they'd have to do is know something about us.
They'd have to pick up some viruses.
Viruses are all over.
Study the cells that it wants the virus to get into.
For example, if it wants the virus to get into, let's say, the upper respiratory system, it has to have the keys that the influenza virus, the virus that causes flu, has.
You could have a virus that starts out in the upper respiratory tract, kind of hides there for a while.
People would have mild symptoms.
Maybe it's just a little flu, a little cold.
Nothing to get worried about.
And then viruses can do other things.
lf the goal is to kill people Help! l need help over here! Hurry! you would want it to then become much more pathogenic.
Man : Get back! At this point, you'd want the virus to go through the second phase where the virus is moving through the bloodstream.
These are the cells that are attacked by the Ebola virus.
Hurry! Quick! All of the sudden, people who had this virus would start bleeding profusely.
-- So people coming in contact -- Hurry! would all pick up the virus.
[ screaming .]
Forget about lasers, the flying saucers, and the robots.
That's old sci-fi thinking.
When aliens come to kill us, their weapons will be our own bodies.
[ barking .]
Now that they have the perfect biological weapon, how do they introduce that into the human population around the world? Well, our biosphere has ready-made transmission mechanisms already in it.
They're all around us in nature.
Simon : So, if l was an alien who wanted to disseminate this virus rapidly, l'd probably use birds.
[ birds chirping .]
Birds and humans have a very similar respiratory tract, so the birds would be flying around, coughing.
Humans would be picking it up.
lt would be a very quick way to disseminate the virus around.
And quarantines wouldn't help.
l mean, birds are everywhere.
lf you have birds that maybe are carrying the virus in droppings, maybe carrying the virus in discharges, which they're discharging as they're flying, you don't even know it.
That would be a very dangerous situation.
[ monitor beeping .]
[ coughing .]
You'd think that by now Western medicine could take care of any virus that came along.
Unfortunately, that isn't the case.
[ coughing .]
Look at his legs! Once the biological weapon has been introduced, there's a clock ticking towards human extinction.
[ wheezing .]
And even if we survive that, what's to stop them from creating a second or a third pathogen? [ beeping .]
So it's time that we think about a different strategy.
[ choking .]
[ coughing .]
[ rapid beeping, flatline .]
At this point, our only hope might be to try to attack and destroy the alien mothership in orbit.
But this is nothing like anything we've ever accomplished before.
That is the definition of a long shot.
Man : 3, 2, 1 , launch.
Launch, launch.
lgnition.
Do we have the capability of attacking an extraterrestrial spacecraft in space? Certainly, we can attack it.
Guidance is on.
That will be a supersonic.
We do have the capability of firing missiles at such a spacecraft.
Time to impact -- 20 seconds.
The question is, what type of weapon do we launch? Our most powerful weapon currently is the hydrogen bomb.
lt's only about this big, and it's capable of wiping out, for example, the entire New York metropolitan area within a fraction of a second.
Some people think, ''Let's nuke the aliens.
'' Well, it's not so easy.
A nuclear weapon on the Earth creates a shockwave that then travels a little bit faster than the speed of sound, pulverizing everything in sight.
ln space, there is no atmosphere.
There's no medium to transmit the shockwave and the heat wave, so the effect is much diminished.
[ indistinct radio chatter .]
Man : Detonate in 3, 2, 1 , mark.
That was our best shot.
Man #2: No, it's not.
We have one more option.
But it's never been used.
[ beep .]
We've seen what aliens could do to Earth, to us.
But what could we do to them? Based on the analysis of our expert scientists and authors, how could we possibly fight back? [ beeping .]
With nuclear weapons off the table, we'd have to think out of the bo x.
One of the most far-out ideas for attacking an object in orbit was conceived of by Edward Teller in the '50s during the nuclear-test program.
lt's called a thunder well.
So, thunder wells is really just an old concept from the nuclear-weapons days that might be successfully employed against an extraterrestrial adversary.
Thunder wells is using the power of a nuclear weapon to be able to convert that energy into steam, of all things, and then be able to drive that steam as a steam piston to be able to drive tons of material into space.
This was actually discovered back in 1 956.
The story goes that Edward Teller was conducting an underground nuclear blast and that the hole was sealed with a metal plate.
Man : 4, 3 When it was detonated, the explosion was so intense and the pressures were so intense that he blasted the metal plate into orbit.
Zero.
Beason : They calculated the velocity that this was going, and it was six times escape velocity, so it was over 42 miles a second which this plate was going.
You dig a very large 4-meter-diameter hole, say, half a kilometer underneath the surface.
You fill this hole full of water, and at the bottom of the well is, you have a nuclear weapon.
And at the very top, you place a plug and a large match, hundreds of tons of material.
You let off the nuclear weapon.
You explode it.
The gamma rays are absorbed by the water.
Turns into steam near instantaneously.
The steam pushes up and accelerates up through the hole, and it actually accelerates this as a giant piston.
Haqq-Misra: lf we do successfully breach the hull of an alien spacecraft, it could prove very difficult for them.
lf they're interested in Earth because of its atmosphere and its environment, then that may mean that their ship is pressurized, as well, to match the atmosphere of Earth.
So, in that case, a hull breach would cause de-pressurization of the cabin.
lt may not take out the mothership, but it would send an important message to the extraterrestrial invaders, and that is we do have some capability to attack them, and it's not going to be easy for them.
And that's really the point of asymmetric warfare.
lt's not that we're trying to win.
We're just going to show them that we can put up a resistance and it's going to be long and hard for them if they want to keep their presence there.
Bartell : Most of the people in the world would probably be unaware for quite a while.
But to those people who were there and made it happen, the elation they would feel after so many failures and the sudden feeling of having some bit of power, it would be astonishing.
Davis: l think that if we were actually able to score some kind of a victory against the aliens, that would be a huge unifying factor for people.
That really would incite a lot of hope.
Bartell : Rebuilding the world after such an event would be a multi-faceted task involving reestablishing communications and transportation and food production and many other things.
We can't also forget that there was this alien pathogen among us, and we may still be battling that for a long time to come.
[ siren wails in distance .]
Should we spend a lot of time worrying about, considering, preparing for an extraterrestrial invasion of Earth? Well, it hasn't happened yet.
But there's no way of proving that it can't happen.
We have absolutely no idea what we could do about an extraterrestrial invasion.
We'd have to make it up as it went along, assuming we even got the chance to do that.
Kaku : l think it's more a question of our personal fears and personal hysteria that makes us fear the possibility of an invasion from outer space.
But, hey, you never know.
One of the values of a program such as this -- books, any discourse on this kind of topic whatsoever -- is that it sort of draws attention to our vulnerability the fact that we are a very small, precious blue marble in the middle of an immense, immense vastness of space.
And threats can come in many shapes and many forms, some more likely than the other.
How likely is an alien threat? We can't rule it out.
And if it should turn out to be the case, we'll sure wish we'd prepared for it.