A Look At First Contact In Sci-fi Through The Ages 

Aliens have always been a huge point of inspiration for film and television. The thought of extraterrestrial life expands the imagination to enormous proportions, allowing for a wide range of stories. By default, first contact and communicating with aliens is an important element of those narratives. Some bypass this problem by having the aliens speak in English or having the characters use universal translators. But other stories take a more nuanced approach to communicating with extraterrestrial species. So it’s interesting to see how these approaches  have been used over the years.

Probably the most seminal movie regarding first contact is Steven Spielberg‘s 1977 film Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. The entire film builds to a climax of first contact, where the scientists attempt to communicate with the aliens using a series of lights and sounds. It’s a very basic and rudimentary form of communication that managed to work. But it’s also a bit unrealistic. As science fiction evolved over the years, another attempt at first contact was made with Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival. The movie revolved around a linguist played by Amy Adams attempting to decipher symbols to communicate with the aliens.

In more recent years, a very complex system of communication was devised in Star Trek: Discovery. Normally, aliens in Star Trek communicate through universal translators. But these aliens are so far removed from the Milky Way that such devices were rendered ineffective. These aliens communicated using bioluminescence and pheromones, so humans needed to use molecules the aliens sent out as a decoder for their language. As sci-fi continues to progress in the years to come, it will be interesting to see how future stories handle this very complicated topic.

Arrival and Star Trek: Discovery are now streaming on Paramount+.