One of the questions that will surely concern historians of the future is the image modern humans have formed of what an extraterrestrial visitor might look like.

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Since the existence of such beings has not yet been verified by conventional science, imagination rushes to fill this gap in knowledge, enjoying the rare privilege of assigning them any form it desires. Yet at this point, something rather peculiar occurs: the images we adopt to describe these distant visitors are surprisingly conservative—almost dull—and certainly lacking in creativity.

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Most people imagine intelligent beings from other planets as humanoid in appearance: two legs, two arms (perhaps with an added tail as an exotic accessory), and a head equipped with eyes, ears, and maybe an antenna to emphasize their alien origin. Their skin, inspired perhaps by human diversity and early 20th-century science fiction literature and cinema, is typically green or grey—more recently even reptilian.

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Of course, within this diverse pantheon of interstellar travelers, there is also the version that depicts them as nearly identical to humans, albeit far more attractive, shaped by arbitrary standards of beauty rooted in Northern European aesthetics. These standards, widely adopted across much of the world, reflect the historical reality that the most economically powerful and technologically advanced societies have long been concentrated in the Northern Hemisphere. One may reasonably ask: if global power had instead developed in Africa, would our conception of “ideal beauty”—and perhaps even our imagined extraterrestrials—look entirely different?

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Beyond their anthropomorphic appearance, it is equally striking how we imagine their technology. We picture them emerging from gleaming, metallic “flying saucers” that defy gravity—a phenomenon that remains one of the great unsolved challenges of modern physics. They wear uniform-like suits, helmets, are accompanied by robots, and carry weapons resembling futuristic ray guns. In essence, they are not fundamentally different from how we imagine our own distant descendants might appear, once human technology has advanced enough to bridge the vast distances between the stars.

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According to modern scientific understanding, however, such assumptions are, at best, naive.

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The astonishing diversity of life on our own planet—and the radically different evolutionary paths it has taken—demonstrates that human morphology is by no means the most efficient or inevitable form. Our temporary dominance over Earth’s ecosystems appears to be the product of contingent evolutionary circumstances. Indeed, many climatologists emphasize that the rise of human civilization owes much to the relatively stable and mild climate of the past ten thousand years—a brief interglacial period that allowed agriculture and population growth to flourish.

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At the same time, ecology warns us that this period of success may be nearing its end. Environmental mismanagement and overexploitation could render Earth increasingly hostile to human life. Yet, if we examine life more closely, we find that beyond its diversity, it is also extraordinarily resilient and inventive. Bacteria thrive within active volcanic craters, algae grow inside nuclear reactors, entire ecosystems flourish in the lightless depths of the ocean, and microorganisms persist even in the upper layers of the atmosphere, entering dormant states until conditions allow them to revive.

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Even more striking is the fact that biology still struggles to define life itself. Is a virus—incapable of reproduction without a host cell, yet possessing a crystal-like structure—truly alive? Could the Earth as a whole, behaving as a self-regulating system with complex feedback mechanisms, be considered a single living organism?

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The concept of intelligence is equally problematic. If intelligence is measured by the ability to adapt to and manage environmental challenges, then viruses, microbes, and bacteria may, in many ways, surpass human capability. Cybernetics suggests that intelligence emerges from the structure of the system that hosts it, raising further questions: are collective organisms—such as beehives, termite colonies, or ant societies—intelligent? These systems construct highly sophisticated structures using principles of engineering and climate control only recently understood by humans. Even if we attribute their behavior to “instinct,” a term that itself explains very little, their achievements remain undeniable.

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In conclusion, both extraterrestrial and terrestrial intelligence may possess characteristics and modes of interaction so unfamiliar that we are incapable of recognizing them. Bees, for instance—do they dream?

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All of these considerations lead to a profoundly unsettling realization: if we cannot determine which environments are truly hostile to life, and if we cannot even define life or intelligence with certainty, then the universe may be teeming with living systems and intelligences entirely beyond our perception.

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We may, in fact, exist within a vast network of communication and movement—a kind of galactic crossroads—of which we remain completely unaware, much like ants living beside a highway without any understanding of the traffic passing by. And if extraterrestrial intelligences have visited—or continue to visit—our world, it is entirely possible that we are simply incapable of perceiving them. A technology advanced enough to traverse interstellar distances would appear indistinguishable from magic, as Arthur C. Clarke famously observed. There is also the possibility that such beings are utterly indifferent to us, much as humans walking through a field pay no attention to the insects among the flowers.

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If such intelligences exist, they have likely passed through here. This idea is not as improbable as it may initially seem. Across human traditions, there are countless accounts of encounters with non-human intelligences and of places considered “haunted”—locations where reality itself appears to behave strangely.

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If “others” are already here, they likely do not arrive in metallic craft or carry ray guns. Their presence may instead be revealed through far subtler and more elusive phenomena: the strange atmosphere of certain places, unusual patterns of mental disturbance among nearby populations, recurring anomalous dreams, peculiar weather behaviors, or unexplained sounds and scents associated with locations long believed best avoided.

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Erik Smyrnaeos