Aliens

Does Spielberg’s new movie have real UFOs?

Steven Spielberg might be the most beloved and popular American director of the 20th century, but it is also unavoidably the case that, since 2005’s Munich, he has been on something of a disappointing run. While many of his films, not least The Fabelmans and West Side Story, have been critically acclaimed and Oscar-nominated, there is a growing sense that he has not made a really interesting or worthwhile picture in 20 years, with the partial exception of the enjoyable, quirky, Coen Brothers-scripted Bridge of Spies. Anyone who suffered through Ready Player One will know that Spielberg’s abilities to direct large-scale action-adventure films – once peerless – seem to have

The scientific case for the existence of intelligent alien life

The foundation of science is based on the humility to learn, not the arrogance of expertise. When comet experts argued that the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS must be a familiar water-rich comet as soon as it was discovered in July, they behaved like artificial intelligence systems: only able to reflect the data sets they were trained on. For decades, the data set that established comet expertise largely comprised icy rocks in the solar system. My counterpoint is simple: humanity launched technological objects into space, so we must conclude that alien life forms could do the same. This possibility must be added to the training data set of comet experts when studying