The smart and tech-savvy kid characters of Earth to Echo, opening in theaters July 2, establish contact with an alien robot via texts. Smartphones and other consumer gadgets play a major role throughout the movie. Is the premise any more plausible than, say, Will Smith outwitting otherworldly hordes in Independence Day? We asked a man who’d know: Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, an alien hunter by trade and an informal consultant to Hollywood.
Discover: If there’s intelligent life out there, do you think they’d establish contact with us using a droid, as in Earth to Echo?
Shostak: Well, one never knows what aliens have in mind. But the amount of energy required to go from one star system to another is daunting. If the aliens were that advanced and could handle interstellar travel, they would also be advanced enough to know already that there’s biology on Earth. ...
