Why are aliens/E. T.'s always portrayed as more intelligent than us and hostile?

Most alien invasion movies tend to be pretty bad. I guess there’s no story in those movies if there’s not conflict.

More intelligent than us because if they know how to get here over the vast distances of outer space in a reasonable time frame, they have to be. also maybe the author’s or audience’s expected anti-intellectualism trying to portray smart=bad
Hostile because humans are naturally xenophobic.

They’re also not always hostile. I think in District 9 they aren’t… quite hostile. In “Aliens In The Attic” they aren’t hostile. In “E.T. – The Extraterrestrial” they aren’t hostile.

If they figured to get to planet Earth from a long distance planet/galaxy…I guess that’s a lot of intelligence. Don’t you think?

@gggritso true! I didn’t really think about those and let’s not forget Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind! @ragingloli that’s the same thing my husband said, and I counter with; it doesn’t necessarily have to be intelligence. Maybe they age very slowly or have some type of cryo sleep chamber.

E.T. was not hostile, he just wanted to phone home.

in an a nonproduced sequel it would have been revealed that E.T. was a spy sent to reconnoitre Earth’s defensive capabilities. They then started an Invasion and in an act of irony the first one to be killed was the boy
just kidding.

They figured out how to get here while we have yet to figure out how to get wherever they are. That is one area they are clearly smarter in, which leads to the assumption that they are more advanced in other ways.

Maybe they are hostile because they think we are idiots. They see we have found ways to destroy each other, but not without ultimately destroying our own planet with no alternate place to go. Also, the fact that they know we have such weapons may lead them to believe we are the hostile ones and they are on the defensive when they arrive because they think we will automatically try to kill them – which I am guessing we would. IRL, you know.

@Supacase
very likely we would fire the first shot.
i faintly remember when there were strange lights/objects above a city during the time of ww2 and the first thing they did, without ever trying to identify the objects, was pummeling the objects with their FLAKs.
a quote from hl2
“Instinct tells us the unkown is a threat, rather than an opportunity.”

Because most of the movies/stories would be crap if they aliens weren’t smarter than us and hostile. You can only have so much with cutesy aliens like in ET.

An alien invasion without hostilities would simply be a remake of the My Little Pony cartoons. :::shudders:::

Besides, people love explosions and car chases. I’m waitign for the movie where the aliens breed with humans to produce hybrids, and it is as violent and gross as the Alien Face Huggers. yeah, I’ve got a sick mind, sorry.

Because, if we were to ever meet aliens, that would be our worst fear.

Non Hostile:
E.T. the Extra Terrestrial
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
District 9 (I think)
StarMan
The Day The Earth Stood Still
K-Pax
The Brother from Another Planet

Not as smart as we are:
Visit to a Small Planet
ummm…jar jar binks?

Maybe it’s because they have already been here and they were hostile then.

well you see with alien movies that take place here on earth, it’s assumed that they’d have to be intelligent in order to purposefully travel to this planet from theirs (it’s a little difficult)
and they are usually hostile because people like to watch stuff blowing up more than intergalactic hug fests :P.

@ragingloli honestly, I’d almost have to go see that movie though, it’d be ridiculous

Stephen Hawkins explained it as best and simple here.
I quote: ”Professor Hawking, famous for his theories on black holes, warns that the arrival of intelligent alien life would be bad news for humanity.

He believes it would be an experience comparable with the American Indians’ encounter with Christopher Columbus. “I don’t think they were better off for it,” he said. Instead, many were wiped out by new diseases and wars over territory.

Malcolm Young, professor of psychology at the University of Newcastle, agrees wholeheartedly. “It is very, very expensive to do any sort of crewed interstellar travel,” he said. “If anybody, or anything, ever does show up in the solar system then it must be because they really wanted to get here. Goodwill seems an unlikely motivation.”

People are evolutionarily hard-wired to pay more attention to threats than to non-threats, and more to greater threats than to lesser. If aliens in a story or movie were less intelligent than we are, they would feel like less of a threat; if they were non-hostile, they might feel like no threat at all (as in “E.T.”, which is therefore a children’s movie). so stories about them wouldn’t interest us very much and wouldn’t be profitable.

There are SF stories revolving around interesting variations on these themes. in one, extraterrestrials arrive whose intelligence has the same standard deviation as ours, but a lower mean (about 95)—they have a species history hundreds of times longer than ours, so they have had more geniuses (by our standards), just spaced out quite a bit. They strike us as a little “slow”, and, when we get over out idea that they must be smarter (but tricking us for some reason), we scam them left and right.

In another, completely benevolent extraterrestrials much smarter than us arrive, and, despite the best of intentions, make us feel so stupid that we go into a species-wide funk and die off.

@LexWordsmith, slow aliens sounds like an interesting idea. Do you have a book title for me? I don’t feel like googling it, because that requires me to read through hundreds of conspiracy theories :)

1) They’re not. Have a look at Star Trek – the entire premise of the “Prime Directive” is that the Federation isn’t allowed to interfere with any planet’s development that’s less developed than them.

2) “more intelligent” – because if they were less intelligent than us, they wouldn’t be able to get to Earth, and the vast majority of movies/series that involve aliens have them coming here.

3) “hostile” – because “aliens arrive on earth and nothing happens” makes for crappy drama.

It’s a lot more difficult to make an interesting story when aliens are dumber than us and not hostile.

I am excited for the movie district 9. It talks about this topic. In the trailer the alien even wants to go home and we are keeping them here.

Humans fear the unknown. And if we can gain power we like to exploit others. Power brings out the worst in some people.

John Varley’s Eight World series of stories (the first of which is Steel Beach, which I highly recommend) are based on aliens that come to Earth, find that humans have nearly destroyed it, and have kicked us off to live on the other planets and moons in our solar system with varying degrees of success. He never explains what the aliens look like, using the premise that anyone who has seen them has never lived long enough to tell anyone else about the experience.

I asked him directly about this in an email, and that was the answer he gave me, which I found frustrating. They’re his stories, so I can’t really bitch about his methods, I guess.

@evelyns_pet_zebra people are much better at scaring themselves than any writer can think of. But it does seem a tad lazy.

Always? Just look at the Star Trek Universe and you will find all combinations including friendly and less intelligent (and sometimes less developed) than humans. But good fights do increase sales. DS9 and VOY required a few more trigger-happy aliens after all the counseling done by Deanna Troi.

I’m not hostile. Smart enough to use your Internet though.

@markyy : it was a short story from before 1980—i don’t remember the author. i’ll ask some sources.

@LexWordsmith, thanks.

I think this is it:
“The Betelgeuse Bridge” by William Tenn (aka Philip Klass), c.1951

I guess aliens are portrayed as more intelligent because it is usually them that visit us from a huge distance away rather than the other way around which we always assume requires a super technology. There have been lots of benign aliens you know e.g. E.T.
I don’t think I’ll see ‘District 9’ it is just a rip-off of an earlier film called ‘Alien Nation’. So nothing new.
I am surprised that the space around our planet hasn’t beacons warning space travelers away from our sad planet telling of it’s occupants senseless violence. Let me recommend the film ‘The Road’. I wonder if there are more ‘end of the world’ movies around at the moment because our collective conciousness can feel it’s coming closer. The honey bee, who did nothing but make yummy sweetness has almost died out now. I’m rambling, I’ll go now….....