MYTH NO. 5

Aliens would steal our water and metal

The aliens in Independence Day famously arrive to strip Earth of its resources. But again, that logic doesn’t add up, writes Dartnell. Most of our metal is in the Earth’s core, not its crust; asteroids would be far better targets for mining. And icy moons, like Jupiter’s Europa, would be easier places to stock up on water. They’re uninhabited, and they don’t have Earth’s strong gravitational pull.

So if aliens aren’t interested in harvesting our lands or our bodies, why would they make contact? Dartnell suspects a purer motive: curiosity. “If aliens did come to Earth,” he writes, it would probably be “as researchers: biologists, anthropologists, linguists, keen to understand the peculiar workings of life on Earth, to meet humanity and learn of our art, music, culture, languages, philosophies and religions.”

Presumably, we would hide our alien movies.