What do the aliens really want from us?

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Once upon a time, aliens were easy. They wanted to kill us. Okay, kill us and take over our awesome, green, water-filled planet. (Think Independence Day or War of the Worlds.) Occasionally, as in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, they hijacked our minds and bodies instead of murdering us. Still, we humans were only ever a minor impediment — in many of the movies a wild, germ-ridden, victorious one. To the aliens, we didn’t really matter as a species. We were small, weak, easily slaughtered, impractical to enslave. Their goal was the Earth, whose resources they would presumably extract for their own selfish use, either carting everything away into space or sticking around and using them up until the next Earth-like orb beckoned. It was just dumb luck that we evolved into intelligence now, in time to resist them, instead of 10,000 years too late.

Those were simple aliens for simpler times. It felt natural to imagine that if aliens existed, and if they traveled halfway across the galaxy to reach us, it was only because they wanted what we possessed. Anyone could understand that with a single glimpse of a slimy, non-humanoid carapace. No backstory or character development necessary! Let’s get to blowing shit up!

Obviously, not all aliens fit this mold. The Predators, for example, cared enough about us as individuals to want to hunt the best of us down, one by one; clearly, it’s because they come from a post-scarcity society — like that of Star Trek! — where all can devote themselves to altruistic hobbies, with no need for capitalist conquest¹. The aliens of They Live, who masqueraded as humans in skin suits, had less interest in replacing us than in being us, enjoying the elite fruits of yuppie privilege while keeping the masses complacent through subliminal messaging. And the Martians of Mars Attacks! apparently invaded for the lulz³.

Meanwhile, a whole menagerie of other aliens are conquerors by accident. The aliens of Alien, A Quiet Place, and The Thing, among others, have found their way to Earth on meteors, in cargo holds, as scientific specimens, and once unleashed are merely doing what it is in their nature to do — kill, eat, reproduce — with no specific designs on power as we might imagine it. They don’t want our freshwater, our oil, our gold, our women, just regular meals and a dark, humid environment in which to set up a lair. These aliens suck, often literally, but it’s possible to feel some sympathy for them. After all, none of these creatures asked to be sent here… as far as we know…

Each of these approaches to aliens is pretty clearly a reflection of human anxieties. We worry about being dominated, outcompeted, out-invented, replaced not just physically but metaphorically. If we’re not the smartest, cleverest, best adapted on the planet — if we can’t tame the natural world and bend technology to our will — then what is the point of us at all?

Which is why I’m so intrigued by two big science-fiction productions that just came out: Bugonia, the new film directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and starring Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons, and Pluribus, the new Apple TV± series from Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan, starring Rhea Seehorn of Better Call Saul. Both rethink the alien-invasion script in ways that feel fresh and timely, if not necessarily 100% brand-new.

More — including spoilers! there are spoilers below! beware! — after the ad…

Okay, let’s do the thing where I tell you what these are about: In Bugonia, Jesse Plemons plays Teddy, a struggling schmo in Georgia who kidnaps Michelle Fuller, a powerful CEO (Emma Stone) he believes is secretly an alien Andromedan, sent to Earth to eradicate honeybees and make human life miserable. With his developmentally disabled cousin Don, Teddy shaves her head, slathers her with antihistamine cream, chains her to a bed in the basement, and harangues her into admitting her evil plan.

The final-act surprise here is: He’s right! Michelle is an Andromedan, and Teddy was right to shave her head because she uses her hair to communicate with the mothership.

Except that Teddy is also wrong: The Andromedans are not here to dominate the Earth but to save it, attempting to cure humans of a form of aggression that has set them on a path to destroying themselves and the planet. Teddy’s ploy ultimately fails, and Michelle, once back in space, decides to kill all humans and return the Earth to the animals. Oh, Teddy!

In Pluribus, meanwhile, Rhea Seehorn plays Carol, an alcoholic romantasy novelist who is immune to an alien virus that has taken over the minds of all but a dozen other human beings. The virus has turned humanity into a big hive mind — all memories, knowledge, and emotions are instantly shared among everyone, allowing them to act in sync to accomplish anything anywhere. And the thing is, though they may no longer be individuals, they’re nice. This alien DNA has conquered the planet, ended all conflicts, and refuses to kill for food — or any other reason⁴.

What’s more, they are devoted to taking care of Carol and the other immunes, ensuring that they understand what’s happening, that they have food and shelter, and that they can live out their lives as they wish. I mean, sure, the new human hive mind wants to figure out why Carol and the others are immune, so they can be made non-immune and join the hive, but they’re not dicks about it. Till they figure it out (which may be a few months, or may be never), the immune get to do what they want on a planet that’s better cared for than it has been in centuries. Or so it seems: “We've all seen this movie,” Carol insists to her fellow immunes, “and we know it does not end well.” Maybe it doesn’t end well — maybe it ends really, really well.

So here’s the coincidental question of late 2025: What if we should just let the aliens invade? What if they’d be better at this whole “running the Earth” thing than we are?

It’s hard to argue against the idea that we’re bad at it. Pollution, disease, war, social media, Labubus — all are evidence that, despite our advances, our creativity, and our clear potential for kindness, we seem destined to fuck up everything we touch. Some of us feel like we’ve wound up in the wrong timeline. Other, more nihilistic sorts want to bring human hegemony to an absolute end. Too many of us look to authoritarians, trusting in their abusive certainty and allowing us to shrug off our collective responsibility for the ruination of the planet. This “aliens will save us” fantasy almost feels like a Hollywood liberal extension of that last idea: The vast majority of us are clearly toddlers, so might as well let the E.T.’s have a turn².

The difference is this, I think. On the national level, giving fascists free rein at least lets us tell ourselves that our nation — whichever despot-run shithole that happens to be — has a purpose. That’s MAGA, right? Let that one guy whose name I keep forgetting do absolutely everything he wants, and America (and Americans) becomes great again.

With the aliens, though, you have to look further down the road to wonder: What then is the point of humanity? If we can’t even properly operate this world we’ve lucked into, if the monsters from across the stars are more trustworthy than us homegrown schmucks, then what are we supposed to do with the remainder of our species’ lifespan? In the absence of God and the presence of Klaatu, why are we? What looks like salvation from beyond provokes an existential angst no intelligent supercomputer can resolve.

Some science fiction attempts to answer these questions. In Childhood’s End, the 1953 novel by Arthur C. Clarke, alien Overlords who happen to look like devils — hooves, wings, claws, tails, a predilection for lurking about rural crossroads at midnight on the off-chance a blues musician happens by — arrive on Earth and promptly solve all of our problems, bringing about a heretofore unknown era of peace and stability. And they’re doing this so that Homo sapiens can, in the next generation or two, evolve into its next stage, transcendent, telekinetic beings whose hive mind will merge with a universal cosmic consciousness. Oh, and after that Homo sapiens will go extinct. Till then, though, peace and stability!

These anxieties also feel particularly American. We’re supposed to be exceptional, right? If we can’t be the absolute best, triumphing over invaders in Independence Day or solving the galaxy’s problems in Star Trek, then we must be the worst, flailing in the face of domination and glumly admitting the superiority of our conquerors (at least until we discover their weakness and assassinate their queen, which because they’re almost always a hive mind will kill them all in one fell swoop, duh). And really, we want it both ways. We want to be the leader and the underdog. We Americans already live in parallel political and cultural universes, so it kinda-sorta makes sense. Unless you think about it, of course.

Because filmed sci-fi drama needs the highs and lows of all-or-nothing conflict, it’s harder to find examples of stories that imagine a middle way, in which it’s not really clear who’s superior, the aliens or the humans. From 1988 to about 1991, the movie and TV series Alien Nation gave it a shot: A space ship lands in the Mojave Desert carrying 300,000 “Newcomers,” humanoids who were essentially slaves to another (unseen, I believe) alien race. Unable to leave Earth, they have to settle here — and to integrate and assimilate as much as ambivalent humans will allow them. Similarly, in 2009’s District 9, a ship full of a million insectoid aliens gets stuck outside Johannesburg, South Africa, and face the kind of discrimination and abuse humans had previously reserved for local refugees. In both of these, the power dynamics remain in flux: The aliens may have advanced technology, but that doesn’t mean it always works; their bodies may be stranger or stronger, but we’ve got the numbers; and neither of our societies is anywhere close to utopian. Little green men, they’re just like us — unable to repair the family sedan and too proud or cheap to call a mechanic.

One of my favorite middle-way stories is the book series that begins with The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, by Becky Chambers, which follows the multi-species crew of the spaceship Wayfarer on their wormhole-tunneling mission to a distant world. Though the main character, Rosemary Harper, is human, humanity is anything from exceptional in this universe. Other species are older, smarter, more sophisticated, more influential, and frankly better looking. Human beings don’t matter all that much to the galaxy. (It’s the opposite of Star Trek, where humans are disruptive “hold my beer” geniuses.) In different, more blockbuster-oriented hands, the story might have been more anxious about this middling status, but instead it’s freeing. The stakes are lower, allowing Rosemary to be more of a human, with her own problematic individual history and desires, and less of a representative for Earth’s dominant species. Here space is basically Sweden. Beam me up, Sven!

Sadly, the most realistic depiction of an alien visitation to Earth may be — no, not Arrival, sorry — the 1972 Russian novel Roadside Picnic, which was made into the 1979 movie Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky. Here, our planet has been visited, briefly, by otherworldly beings who’ve left behind zones where the normal rules of physics and biology have been bent beyond our understanding. It is into these zones that “stalkers” infiltrate, attempting to retrieve transformed objects for profit while avoiding horrific death by unknown phenomena: killer cobwebs, meat grinders, witches’ jelly. (Yup, it’s an inspiration for Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach series.) Why are these zones so weird? What did these aliens want with us? We don’t know. We can’t know. One character speculates that the visitations were no invasion but a mere stop-over, a roadside picnic after which the aliens discarded a ton of trash that’s wrecked our environment. Humans? What humans? These aliens might not have noticed we were here at all.

And that to me seems like the best sci-fi metaphor for the end of 2025: We live on a planet where powers beyond our imaginations cavort as if we didn’t exist, yet we are the ones who have to deal with the environmental impacts of their lifestyle. They play and move on untouched. We suffer and struggle and die. And still, despite the horrors they’ve unthinkingly inflicted upon us, we sift through their garbage, hoping to glean a scrap or an insight that will grant us access to their realm, so that we can become our own conquerors, alien to ourselves. To which I say: Stop the world, I want to get off! 🪨🪨🪨