Alien Encounters

Thanks to David Brin‘s recommendation, I spent an unexpected weekend on interview for an upcoming episode of Alien Encounters. Produced by Karga7,  this Science Channel show imagines an alien spaceship that lands on Earth to disperse a mysterious microbial substance. Minus the space ship, it sounds rather like The Highest Frontier. Above is Avi’s story board, and here is Scott’s desk in their church-basement LA studio.

A question that came up was, how would Earthlings react when a an alien microbial substance attaches to people? Most likely, I thought, people would define a subclass of infected individuals to quarantine, then ignore that the more “important” classes are infected too. That’s what we did with AIDS. (Coincidentally, the US government just decided, after 30 years, to recommend HIV testing everybody, not just risk groups.)  What do you think?