In it, he claimed that intelligent alien life almost certainly exists and that the search for it is valuable.
That is unless we do ever contact alien life that is comprehensible.
Down the years most of our images of alien life have come not from the world of science but from the field of entertainment.
In France, this less comforting view of a universe filled with alien life was adopted by an enigmatic Belgian who wrote under the pseudonym J.
The borg is a character in the television show Star Trek: The Next Generation, an alien life form that is part human and part machine.
It starts as a fifties war-of-the-worlds pastiche: an alien life-form arrives in a meteor and quickly mutates, threatening to destroy Arizona as we know it.
Ever since a spaceship supposedly crashed outside the town of Roswell in 1947, this arid landscape has been the rumoured home of all kinds of alien life.
The payoff promises to be a scientific bonanza of data about alien life that survives such extreme conditions as well as clues to the origins of the Earth itself.
It is not yet known if it is male or female, but names being suggested included Snowy, Frosty and Alf - related to the TV character which stands for Alien Life Form.
According to Brian Stableford, writing in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, the definitive reference on the genre, Camille Flammarion was the first author to present a popular fictional portrait of truly alien life-forms.
Perhaps the most famous effort in the hunt for alien life is the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Seti), once funded in part by US space agency Nasa, which continues to listen to and look around the cosmos for signs of intelligent civilisations elsewhere.
As well as being able to chip in with opinions about what constitutes a planet, the team are letting students develop data mining experiments, looking for patterns that could assist in the discovery of alien life -- or just look neat when graphed visually.
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The original guy-in-the-hair-suit, Peter Mayhew, voices the furry alien he brought to life all those years ago, and according to him, Chewie is a little bit younger and less experienced than the Wookiee most fans are familiar with.
SETI's search for intelligent life in outer space may be on ice for the time being, but the search for alien planets that may possibly support life of some sort is now being bolstered by a number of new efforts.
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Those with wealth experience life in an alien way, one that forever floats beyond the comprehension of those who lack it.
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Co-written by Xiu and director Hanawa Yukinari, the film suffers an occasional lapse in continuity, but is fascinating both for its evenhanded look at life among Tokyo's alien population, as well as for its attempts to capture visually the rhythm of the city without endings.
It continued: "They acquire an alien ship which gives them a second chance at life and become the most unlikely heroes of their time".
Web sites abound for alien-seekers: people trying to prove there is life on other planets or that entities from other planets have visited Earth.
Half-Life 2 revisits Gordon Freeman and gives him an alien occupation to fight off and a gravity gun to help him with the dirty work.
None of the alien planets detected so far appear suitable for conventional carbon-based life as known on Earth.
No serving British prime minister until Winston Churchill had ever visited the United States, and the American way of life was widely suspected in Britain of being crass and alien.
Now the larger-than-life insanity of the Saints series gets a new twist with a catastrophic alien invasion, and the aliens have transported the Saints to a bizarro-Steelport simulation.
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