Coming north from the town of Alamo, where I stayed overnight in a cabin, the Extraterrestrial Highway began as an innocuous flat road through scrubby highlands.
Work on the language of the film's extraterrestrial beings began in 2005, and Cameron began developing the screenplay and fictional universe in early 2006.
"Evidence is beginning to mount for coupling extinction events to extraterrestrial causes," says geochemist Luann Becker of the University of California, Santa Barbara.
They also uncovered possible evidence that life on Earth began from extraterrestrial ancestors, and that a cabal of government, science and industry leaders was trying to create a race of superhumans to fight a global takeover by aliens.
For me, the key sequence in that film comes after the Richard Dreyfuss character witnesses some extraterrestrial events, and he begins to create these two strange structures out of very mundane objects.
The discovery of extrasolar planets, beginning in the early 1990s and accelerating thereafter, has provided further information for the study of possible extraterrestrial life.
Beginning with the sound of waves and seagulls, 'Is That a Ship I Hear?' bore all its producer's hallmarks: the boot-stomping drums, the extraterrestrial keyboard sound, and fierce, fierce compression.
He starts with Frank Drake, who began hunting for extraterrestrial intelligence in 1960 and is known for the Drake equation, which identifies the longevity of a technological civilisation as the key factor in whether we will ever observe one or communicate with it.
"We sail into the future, just as Columbus did on this day 500 years ago," Dr. Billingham said on Oct. 12, 1992, when after two decades of planning and maneuvering NASA formally began its search for extraterrestrial intelligence, known by the acronym SETI.
"They're already here, but we can't see them," the narrator began, explaining that deadly extraterrestrials called Pox had escaped from a laboratory.
