What Bugonia reveals about the real search for aliens

What Bugonia reveals about the real search for aliens

By Emma Gomez edited by Claire Cameron

IN bugonia, everything starts with bees. A warehouse worker, Teddy (played by Jesse Plemons), accuses the powerful CEO Michelle (Emma Stone) of being an alien who is secretly killing bees and disrupting the ecosystems humans depend on for food.

“The signs,” says Teddy, “are obvious.”

It’s a fun and poignant premise. But at the center of the film is a compelling question that scientists around the world are working to answer: How would we know if we saw an alien?

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To identify alien life, scientists need to be able to tell that the thing they are considering is alive. But there isn’t as much consensus about what “life” really is as you might think.

“We don’t have a very clear theoretical and experimental program for asking questions about the nature of life,” says Sara Walker, an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist at Arizona State University. Essentially, our work criteria are based solely on life on Earth. But across the vastness of the universe, life can appear radically different from what we’ve seen on our planet.

Walker theorizes that life may not need to be based on organic molecules, cells and DNA, for example. Rather, it may be easier to identify life using what she and her colleagues call “assembly theory,” which means discovering complex systems that descend from traceable lineages and have changed their environment in a way that only a living thing could.

What might it look like outside Earth? Well, we have no idea – yet. “The vast possibility of life far exceeds both what has been actualized here on Earth in our one biosphere and also potentially our imagination,” says Mike Wong, an astrobiologist at the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Earth & Planets Laboratory.

All living things on Earth have been honed by millions of years of evolution and co-evolution with all the other creatures and the planet’s diverse environments. It’s reasonable to assume that an alien is likely to look nothing like an Earthling, Wong says, because its evolutionary history may be determined by a radically different world with unique pressures and environments.

And as regards bugonia, “I think it would be highly unlikely that aliens would look like Emma Stone,” says Wong.

Even small differences between worlds can change evolutionary outcomes a lot. Take, for example, two identical Earths, says Nathalie Cabrol, an astrobiologist and director of the Carl Sagan Center for Research at the SETI Institute, a non-profit dedicated to searching for extraterrestrial intelligence. If one Earth has a fraction of a second difference in its orbit than the other, then it’s possible that “the evolution is going to be drastically different,” she says. “You’re going to have extinctions that aren’t timed the same way. You’re going to be hit by more asteroids, or you’re going to avoid one,” she speculates.

But for the sake of argument, let’s say an alien, as suggested in Bugoniahappens to look a lot like us. How would we know it wasn’t a human?

The last universal common ancestor of all life on Earth, known as LUCA, is embedded in the genes of all beings. Because all living things arose from LUCA, plants, animals and microbes share certain basic characteristics, such as storing genetic information in DNA and RNA. Alien life, apparently, would have arisen elsewhere and thus not share this common ancestor. As a result, the alien would almost certainly not have the same basic chemical or genetic building blocks that all life on Earth shares — and a simple genetic test would reveal that, Wong says.

As unlikely as it is that we will ever meet an alien that that’s just how it happens to look like Emma Stone, Bugonia shows how fictional stories about aliens tend to be wrapped up in very real human problems, says the SETI Institute’s Cabrol.

“Why would I start looking at somebody and say, ‘You’re an alien?'” she says. “Is there something in our society today that says, ‘You look like something I recognize, but that’s not really us’?”

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