I love Sci-Fi as a genre. It allows authors to come up with fantastical ideas about the universe and make their own decisions about how species (including humanity) will progress. Contrary to how most fantasy is written (most fantasy universes fall into the same Tolkien-esque universe set up) you will see far more creativity and diversity in universes. Sure, sometimes (I am looking right at you original Star Trek) you get the racist "all people of a race are exactly the same in terms of personality/outlook that plagues fantasy, but sometimes you get depictions of truly wonderful, expansive worlds (Now I am looking at you, Star Trek: The Next Generation).
I bring this up because I just saw this. Fuck yeah! Go evolution! How great is that? Microbes that eat straight up electrons! Sure they are microscopic, but it's a start. This isn't the only odd lifeform that interacts with the world differently than one would have expected. It's amazing! Therein lies the point I would like to make about movies and sci-fi in general (I know that a lot of non-mainstream science fiction actually goes into this stuff) that most pop culture seems to try to propagate.
Most of the people reading this will have seen Independence Day, Mars Attacks, or myriad other flicks about aliens deciding to take over our planet. This stems from our innate fear that since we in the western world have a tendency to oppress peoples with less technological advancement than ourselves, could have the same thing happen to us via a group of people/aliens with better technology. History is rife with examples of foreign species doing this: West v. Native Americans, West v. Indians, China v. other place China thought should be theirs, etc. So it is a clear possibility/certainty that it would happen to us. Horror movies tend to use this particular fear to poke at us in unsettling ways. They use fears that are in the recesses of the mind to illicit a response. In movies about aliens they always show up and fuck up the world with advanced tech, just like we did, but we always win in the end because plot. In any rational universe we would lose. There is no way that Jeff Goldblum, no matter how sexy a man he is, would be able to use a virus made using our tech to shut down the alien's computers and deliver it with a computer made on Earth. How would the computers even communicate? What if the aliens used mac computers instead of windows? We would be fucking toast. I get the whole "yay humanity binds together to overthrow oppressors" thing, after all it's an OK enough ending that makes people feel better than if we were all turned into stains on walls. But realistically when the aliens have giant, fuck off, city-destroying lasers and impenetrable shields, we lose. Anything that could travel that far would have the tech to drop us like a bad habit. That's why they are scary.
Here's the thing though, despite what certain people think, we don't know at all how interactions with alien life would go down. You see, one of the great things about science is that science tends to work within a paradigm, a set of rules based on experience and tested theories that create a set of rules by which we organize the known universe. Science is also great because it shifts these rules every time it comes up with evidence that calls them into question. This can happen by accident, or because people go out to push the boundaries. When scientists encounter something, they tend to compare it to already discovered things to try and make sense of it, and this makes perfect sense as a starting place. Scientists then move on from this position and test the subject on its own terms when they don't quite fit the paradigm. We haven't found alien life yet (and I do mean yet, we live in a big universe and we aren't special, just lucky) but when we do we have exactly 0 ideas as to what it will be like. Its totally unprecedented.
We expect to find life that falls within certain bounds because that is how it worked here, but what if life evolved in a way that is anathema to everything we know? If this life is sapient, what if they developed cultures that didn't seek to oppress others? What if they visit as anthropologists (or would it be xenologists)? By trying to make sense of something by comparing it to things you already know about you make some basic assumptions. I don't want to say that this way of doing things is bad, it isn't. Science gives us the best understanding of the world that is possible given the tools at hand, and using that understanding when looking at our own world has been helpful. Its just that when pop culture talks about a hypothetical alien species it comes from a very different location that we have no real information about, so trying to project a level of intention onto them is damaging. I am not saying that you should assume in the other direction, that all aliens would be hippies that want to spread love.
You need to interact with things on their own terms. Don't Judge Aliens by the ideas that are imparted by pop culture. When thinking about the possibility of life on other planets, it is easy to imagine something similar to us, but what if it isn't? Wouldn't that be amazing? We would get to interact with something that understands the universe with a very different understanding than ours, and through that, we might understand the universe in a more complete way! That's fucking awesome!
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