The 8 Most Common Sci-Fi Visions of the Future (And Why They'll Never Happen)

#4 An Invasion by Friendly Aliens

Defining Features:
Aliens that look either exactly like humans or like adorable humanoid stuffed animals; mankind foolishly squandering what could have been the key to curing all disease and suffering; enormous arrays of multicolored lights; someone achieving weightlessness while looking wondrously awed; someone touching an alien for the first time while looking wondrously awed; long shots of people looking up at the night sky; an important lesson about the mistrusting and primitive nature of the human spirit.

Origins:

Alien invaders don't always want to kill us, but when they don't, we usually prove why they should. It all started with the 1951 classic The Day The Earth Stood Still, when an alien named Klaatu and his robot friend Gort came to Earth to save us all from ourselves. They were shot within 10 seconds of landing, imprisoned, escaped, got turned in by a filthy human for the reward, then got shot again ... to death.

But, it's even worse than that: Klaatu wasn't any ordinary interplanetary goodwill ambassador. If you put the pieces of the puzzle together—a mysterious visitor from the heavens, suffering for our transgressions, gets turned in by someone he trusts and is ultimately sacrificed—it becomes fairly clear that we killed Jesus. Again! Way to go, humanity. Real classy.

In humanity's defense, we did treat the Close Encounters of the Third Kind aliens a little better. Though if that film had run another 30 minutes, maybe we'd have seen CIA interrogators hooking electrodes to the aliens' genitals and demanding to know what their ships use for fuel and how we can get our hands on it.

See Also:
Contact, Stranger in a Strange Land, 2001: A Space Odyssey (or at least the third hour, with, you know, the aliens).

Why it Will Never Happen:
It's an irrefutable scientific fact that a species cannot evolve to dominate its planet unless it is made up of merciless killing machines. Any civilization with access to the resources necessary to reach us, has, by definition, gained that access by slaughtering its biological competitors. If they turn up here tomorrow, it's only because they've found out, say, that our ground-up spleens are an afrodisiac for their women.

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