What will the far future look like? For actor Will Smith and his son Jaden, the next generation could mark a "tipping point" for the environment. For futurist Ray Kurzweil, solar power is the solution to our energy ills. But for a look at the really far future, turn to Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of SpaceX and Tesla Motors. He's already thinking about spreading out from Earth to other planets — and engaging the warp drive to get to other star systems.

"There's some potential, even though it sounds science-fictiony, for warp drive to work," Musk said on Tuesday during a Google+ Hangout to publicize "After Earth," Smith's upcoming movie. "Technically, to warp space such that you're traveling at the speed of light, but you've warped space so that space is actually traveling."

Musk was referring to recent studies updating the "Star Trek" conception of warp travel, in which a whole region of the space-time continuum zips along at faster-than-light speeds. Researchers at NASA's Johnson Space Center say the idea isn't as crazy as it sounds, and they're trying to create space-time perturbations on a microscopic scale.

Even NASA Administrator Charles Bolden is on board: "One of these days, we want to get to warp speed," he said last September. "We want to go faster than the speed of light, and we don't want to stop at Mars."

Musk, however, sees Mars as a key stop on the path to turning humanity into a multiplanet species. "Either we're a spacefaring civilization, or we're going to be bound to Earth until some eventual extinction event," he said Tuesday.

All this meshes with the plot of "After Earth," in which Will and Jaden Smith play a father and son who find themselves back on Earth a millennium after cataclysmic events forced humanity to find refuge in a distant star system. The filmmakers organized the Hangout to give the Smiths as well as Musk, Kurzweil and environmentalist Alexandra Cousteau a chance to reflect on humanity's future. (It was also a chance to give the movie some publicity on the day "after Earth Day.")

You can watch the whole Hangout on YouTube, but here are some highlights:

Will Smith on working with his son on the movie: "It was wonderful for the two of us to become environmentally educated together. ... The huge question of water came up: the idea that today it's oil that we're willing to go to war over, and at some point in the future, it's going to be water."

Jaden Smith, 14, on the challenges facing the next generation: "Our world is going to get to a tipping point ... if we want to stop that, then my generation would have to almost become obsessed with it, and say we're stopping everything that we're doing wrong right now: no more plastic, only reusable sources, only solar power."

Alexandra Cousteau, granddaughter of Jacques-Yves Cousteau: "We're on the knife's edge of either protecting this place where we live, or losing an enormous amount of it. But I have to say I completely agree with Jaden, in that this generation has an extraordinary opportunity to use technology that we've never had before ... to actually take control of our use of resources."

Ray Kurzweil, Google's director of engineering, on the promise of solar power: "The total solar energy in the world is on an exponential rise. It's doubling every two years. ... Within 15 years we could meet all of our energy needs with solar. Solar is actually cost-comparative with other forms of energy like fossil fuels without any subsidies in different regions of the world."

More thoughts on the future: 

• Engineering's greatest challenge: our survival
• Take a test drive through the next century
• The biggest challenge for interstellar flight? Us

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Did Oscar-winning actor Russell Crowe really capture photos of a UFO outside his office in Australia, passing over Sydney's Royal Botanic Gardens? Or was it just a sailboat passing by?

In a series of Twitter updates, Crowe — who won the best-actor Oscar for his role in "Gladiator" and recently starred in another Oscar-nominated film, "Les Miserables" — insists that the pictures are real and that they don't show reflections or lens flare. What the YouTube video does show is a series of three timed-exposure photos, with a flat red light moving across the frame.

Crowe said the pictures were taken by a camera (a Canon 5D with no flash, to be precise) that was set up on the balcony of his office in the Sydney suburb of Woolloomooloo to capture pictures of fruit bats rising from the gardens. "This was a big surprise," Crowe wrote.

Some commenters quickly speculated that the UFO was nothing more than reflections from a light, perhaps from a beacon on a sailboat that was passing through nearby Woolloomooloo Bay. But Crowe defended the sighting: "The camera is on a balcony, not behind glass," he told one questioner. "Can't be a lens flare because it moves, camera is fixed," he said in another tweet.

Unless Crowe 'fesses up to a publicity stunt, or accepts one of the alternate explanations offered by skeptics, this sighting is likely to go into a big thick folder of unsolved celebrity UFO files. The conversation also rates a place among Crowe's most entertaining tweets. For what it's worth, here's another one from the Twitter files: "Due to a hangover of massive proportions ... anything I say on Leno tonight needs to be taken with a pinch of salt ... and a slice of lime."

I'll drink to that.

Update for 8 p.m. ET March 6: Facebook friend Tom Jorgenson came up with what seems to be the best explanation for the red light: It's reflected sunlight from a plane passing across the scene near sunset. You can make out what appears to be the outline of the plane's fuselage and tail. The exposure setting may have made the time-lapse pictures look more dramatic. To confirm that hypothesis, you'd have to check the time for the photo-taking session (at sunset) and the orientation of the camera (pointing to reflect the sun's rays into the camera lens). But I think we have a winner. What do you think?

Update for 12:13 a.m. ET March 7: OK, here's a much better explanation. ParaBreakdown's Phil Poling shows why Russell Crowe's UFO is most likely to be a series of long-exposure photos of an Unidentified Floating Object ... which now appears to have been identified. The YouTube video below breaks it down:

More from Cosmic Log's UFO files:

• Exploding UFO looks like weather balloon
• Middle East UFO linked to Russian missile test
• Cosmic Log archive on UFOs

Tip o' the Log to Huffington Post UK for the ParaBreakdown video.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

This story was originally published on Wed Mar 6, 2013 5:52 PM EST

Vulcan and Cerberus (or Kerberos) emerged as the people's choices for naming Pluto's tiniest moons in the SETI Institute's "Pluto Rocks" contest, which ended on Monday. But in the course of running the contest, the organizers fielded 30,000 write-in suggestions — and you may well see some of those suggestions surface in the future.

"I've been delighted by the response," said Mark Showalter, a planetary scientist at the SETI Institute who played a leading role in the discovery of Pluto's fourth and fifth moons. Showalter was the point person for the moon-naming contest, which drew more than 450,000 online votes over the past two weeks.

More than 20 names were on the ballot, including Vulcan (the Roman god of fire) and Cerberus (the watchdog of the underworld). Vulcan was added to the list after the contest started, at the urging of "Star Trek" actor William Shatner, and grabbed the lion's share of the votes. But there were scads of other suggestions that weren't used, mostly because they weren't in line with the International Astronomical Union's tradition that the moons of Pluto should be named after figures from Greek or Roman mythology with some sort of connection to the underworld. Pluto was himself the mythological god of the underworld.

It's the IAU that has the final say over the names for the moons, which were discovered over the past couple of years and are now known merely as P4 and P5. Now that the crowdsourcing contest is over, Showalter willl be meeting with his colleagues on the discovery team and discussing whether to go with Vulcan and Cerberus or some other names. The names selected by the discoverers will then be considered by IAU committee members for adoption or reconsideration.

"It could take one to two months for the final names of P4 and P5 to be selected and approved," Showalter said on the "Pluto Rocks" website. "Stay tuned."

M. Buie / SwRI / NASA / ESA

These two pictures of Pluto represent the Hubble Space Telescope's most detailed view of the dwarf planet, but pictures from NASA's New Horizons probe should provide better resolution.

During a Google+ Hangout, Showalter mentioned the two most frequently suggested names that were left off the ballot. No surprise there: Considering that Pluto is a Disney cartoon character as well as a dwarf planet, you'd expect that Mickey and Minnie (as in Walt Disney's talking mice) would be the favorites.

"Yes, I am a big fan of Disney myself, but no, they are not compliant names," Showalter said. Although Mickey and Minnie make a cuter couple than Orpheus and Eurydice, they're not Greek or Roman mythological characters connected with the underworld.

Some of the other names, however, may come up again. When NASA's New Horizons probe sails past Pluto in 2015, still more mini-moons might be spotted. P6, P7 and so on would provide additional opportunities for the "compliant names" on Showalter's newly expanded list. And that's not all: New Horizons' camera could to snap pictures of previously unseen features on Pluto and its moons, That opens up a new frontier for names.

The names of planetary features don't have to follow the rules about Greek or Roman mythology: On Mercury, for example, craters are named after famous writers and artists. The hydrocarbon lakes detected on Titan, Saturn's largest moon, are named after the earthly lakes they resemble. Titan's mountains are named after the fictional mountains from "The Lord of the Rings" and other works by J.R.R. Tolkien, while the Saturnian moon's dark plains are named after planets from the "Dune" science-fiction series.

For Pluto and its moons, "we have all kinds of options," Showalter said. He noted that the naming suggestions followed some potentially appealing trends — specifically, Norse mythological figures as well as characters and locations from the "Star Wars" movie series and H.P. Lovecraft's fantasy and horror tales. Might we hear about Mount Loki, the Hoth ice sheet or Cthulhu Crater in the years to come? Will some scientist pick up on the Vulcan connection and start naming the hills of a Plutonian moon after Worf, Quark, Chakotay and T'Pol? To paraphrase another character from the "Star Trek" saga: "Make it so!"

More about planetary names:

• Uwingo aims to create Baby Planet Name Book
• How about better names for alien planets?
• Solar system's not changing — just the lingo

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

20th Century Fox

Let's face it: Funding a Death Star would push the federal budget off the fiscal cliff and into a fiscal Death Valley.

The 25,000-plus signers of a "We the People" petition calling on the federal government to start building a Death Star by 2016 must be feeling as peppy as the Rebel Alliance, now that they've put their plea over the threshold that will trigger a response from the White House.

Campaigns on 4chan, Reddit and Twitter helped put it over the top with a day to spare. This means someone at the White House will have to take a good look at the Death Star issue and draw up a response (unless officials decide it would be improper to speak out on something that's more appropriately addressed by, say, the Defense Department, NASA or Lord Vader).

The rationale for securing the funding and resources to start construction was laid out in the petition, created on Nov. 14 by John D. of Longmont, Colo: "By focusing our defense resources into a space-superiority platform and weapon system such as a Death Star, the government can spur job creation in the fields of construction, engineering, space exploration, and more, and strengthen our national defense."

Building the kind of moon-sized Death Star portrayed in the "Star Wars" saga would be a heck of a stimulus program, however. Earlier this year, Centives calculated the cost of the steel alone at $852 quadrillion, or roughly 13,000 times the world's gross domestic product. At the current rate of production, it would take more than 833,000 years to produce enough steel to begin work.

I'm afraid the White House's political deflector shield will be quite operational when that petition arrives.

Administration officials have had a lot of practice dealing with "We the People" petitions that address far-out topics like the Death Star: Last year, for instance, two petitions calling for full disclosure on extraterrestrial visitations reached the standard requiring a response, and the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy rose to the challenge.

"The U.S. government has no evidence that any life exists outside our planet, or that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted or engaged any member of the human race," OSTP's Phil Larson reported on the WhiteHouse.gov website. "In addition, there is no credible information to suggest that any evidence is being hidden from the public’s eye."

I'm hoping that the Death Star petition will provide an opportunity for Larson and his colleagues to come up with a pithier, more creative response ... maybe something that will satisfy the fanboys. Here are a few examples that have popped up over the past few days:

• "The farce is strong in this one." (Commenter on The Ticket)
• "We find its lack of signatures disturbing" (MSNBC's Ed Schultz)
• "We have a bad feeling about this" (Modern Man)

Which "Star Wars" cliches would be most fitting for the task? Try to think of some suggestions you can leave in the comment space below. On second thought, try not. Do, or do not. There is no "try."

More on the Death Star and other petitions:

• White House petitions range from serious to silly
• How the online petition program got started
• Management lesson: Don't rebuild the Death Star
• How much would the Death Star cost?

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

If the sets for "Decay," a super-low-budget flick about zombies at the Large Hadron Collider, look incredibly realistic — well, that shouldn't be surprising. The movie was filmed at the home of the LHC, Europe's CERN physics complex on the French-Swiss border, right under the noses of the authorities.

But don't worry: Everything's cool with CERN, even though they didn't know about the film in advance. The 75-minute movie is a hit, especially when you consider that it cost the grad students who made it just $3,500. And there's no danger that the Higgs boson has a "bio-entanglement" effect that turns underground workers into zombies, as portrayed in the movie.

The film was written and directed by Luke Thompson, a Ph.D. physics student at the University of Manchester who has been working on a project at CERN known as the LHeC experiment. The other masterminds on the "Decay" team included Manchester Ph.D students Hugo Day (stunt coordinator) and Clara Nellist (assistant director). The 20 cast members had no real film experience and worked with props that were scavenged or built by the crew, according to the Mancunion newspaper.

"Decay" was screened for the first time last month in Manchester, and this weekend it made its online debut as a free video on YouTube and the DecayFilm.com website. Thompson told me in an email that he and his fellow filmmakers have been "overjoyed at the reception thus far":

"Reactions have been hugely positive (especially considering it is, after all, the Internet!) and it's great to be getting so much coverage. The premiere in Manchester on the 29th of November was fantastic, and the audience really got into the film, which was great for all of us to experience.

"The tunnels in the film are indeed at CERN, but they're not the LHC tunnels. 'Our' tunnels are the basement-level maintenance tunnels linking many of the buildings at CERN just below ground. These mainly allow access to water pipes and so forth, but nothing critical for the running of CERN or the LHC. As such, they're not restricted access. On the other hand, access to anything important or dangerous, such as the LHC tunnels themselves, is tightly controlled. There are many kilometres of these maintenance tunnels, so of course the film doesn't show them all, but it does show a wide range of them. Many areas have their own unique 'feel,' and where possible we chose locations based on that, depending on what atmosphere we wanted to convey. We show some of the overground part of CERN as well, including (the outside of) the real ATLAS control room building, but of course most of the film is underground. We did try to give an 'overview' of what CERN is really like in the opening credits, before going crazy with the bad science :)

"The idea was entirely based on the location; some of us had been exploring CERN early in our Ph.D.s and, particularly in the case of the tunnels, thought it would make a great setting for a horror movie. We didn't think much more of it at the time, but a few months later it came up again, and we decided to actually make a zombie movie. We perhaps didn't realise how ambitious the project was at the time!

"As for the future: My Ph.D. will be done within about 6 months, after which I'll be doing a further six months' work on the LHeC project. Beyond that, I'm not sure. I've really enjoyed doing this film and have added filmmaking to my already too-long list of hobbies, so it's absolutely something I'll at least continue casually. That said, it's a tricky industry to make a living in, and as great as the reception has been, it's still an amateur film — so I'm not expecting any Hollywood projects to fall into my lap!"

CERN spokesman James Gillies told me that "Decay" wouldn't have been green-lighted if the students had asked, but now that it's out, there's no harm done. Gillies played it cool in his email:

"That film was made by a bunch of grad students in the kind of locations you describe [non-sensitive areas such as conference rooms and maintenance tunnels]. They did not ask permission until the whole film was in the can, at which point they asked us for an endorsement. We took the position that, even though we would not have granted permission had they asked before filming, it would not make any sense for CERN to try and block the film. The underground areas were the basements of the CERN main building complex and connecting tunnels on the Meyrin campus.

"Our criterion for accepting filming requests is based on the portrayal of scientists, not on the accuracy of the science. As you know, we worked with Sony Pictures on 'Angels and Demons.' Even though the science in that film was far from accurate, the scientists were well-portrayed. That's not the case for 'Decay.'

"What do folks think? For my part, it's the product of a bunch of grad students doing the kind of thing grad students do in their spare time.

"Can the Higgs field cause zombification? Well let's just say that the science in 'Decay' is at least as wide of the mark as the science in 'Angels and Demons' ..."

So, once again, LHC zombies are nothing to worry about. It's only a movie. That will surely come as a relief to the kid in this video. 

More about physics at the movies:

• Reality check on 'Angels and Demons'
• How I created an algorithm for Spider-Man
• Physics in the realm of Hollywoodland!
• The physics behind the movie magic

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

(c) Roger Ressmeyer / Corbis

Lasers fire at a fuel pellet inside a nuclear fusion experiment at the University of Rochester's Laboratory for Laser Energetics. Covering the effort to develop fusion as a power source was one of the experiences that led photographer Roger Ressmeyer to move ahead with his "Visions of Tomorrow" film project.

For decades, photographer Roger Ressmeyer has chronicled discoveries the frontiers of science, from nuclear fusion to the edges of the universe, and now he's working to distill all those discoveries into a hopeful film about the future, titled "Visions of Tomorrow."

"This movie will be saying, 'Here's what we can do about humankind's biggest problems. ... The world's future looks a lot brighter than we're led to believe," Ressmeyer says. But in order to get that message onto the big screen, he's going to need a little help — and several million dollars.  That's why he's bringing his project to the Social Innovation Fast Pitch conference in Seattle this week.

Ressmeyer is best-known as a visual storyteller, specializing in the wonders of space and science. It's that reputation that has earned him honors as 2012's PhotoMedia Photography Person of the Year. He has helped chronicle the space effort in magazine layouts and in coffee-table books such as "Orbit," and he has captured images from around the world that make the world's scientific landmarks look like the shrines they deserve to be.

Through the years, Ressmeyer has come to believe that scientific wonders have a spiritual dimension as well. "Visions of Tomorrow" will tell that story, with the help of some of the best minds in science and technology.

"A key spiritual truth is that 'thoughts become things,' as Mike Dooley says," Ressmeyer told me over the weekend. "What we're hoping to do on the spiritual level is to address the collective loss of hope, and create a movie that leaves people walking on air, letting go of fears, and getting behind a better future for the planet."

Visions of Tomorrow

Photographer Roger Ressmeyer is creating "Visions of Tomorrow."

The project sounds a bit like some other science-plus-soul hybrids that have shown up in theaters or on DVD in recent years, ranging from "What the (Bleep) Do We Know" to "I AM" and "The Secret." But Ressmeyer insists that this film will be different.

"There have been many 'new-agey' movies about the fact that humanity is one, and people everywhere are basically good. What makes this movie different is that it will present actual solutions under development by world-renowned scientists, engineers and futurists," he said.

Setting an agenda
So who are these scientists, engineers and futurists? For now, Ressmeyer is being cagey about that question. He's begun to use his network of contacts to recruit the folks that will be featured in the movie, and some filming has been done already. But he's holding back on the details until he assembles a core of executive producers to help shepherd the project — and assembles the financing for the next phase.

He says his vision for "Visions of Tomorrow" aims to touch upon some of the top problems facing humanity, and how science and engineering can turn them around.

"In my years of covering science, I learned how to dig really deep, and how to create images that bring ideas to life," Ressmeyer said. "We'll take the best ideas — the ones most likely to succeed, the ones covering the biggest challenges humanity faces, like resource depletion, climate change and global warming, overpopulation, the effects of war and social distress. In the movie, all of these things will come together in a beautiful, entertaining and inspirational view of what's possible for tomorrow."

Nuclear fusion power seems certain to earn some screen time: Ressmeyer noted that his photo coverage of the fusion frontier was one of the factors that led to the "Visions of Tomorrow" project in the first place.

"We don't expect that every one of these solutions will pan out," he told me, "but we do believe there are enough possibilities out there to produce virtually limitless energy, to address the population issue, climate change, and raise the planet's collective consciousness."

The road ahead
During the Seattle conference on Thursday, Ressmeyer will talk about the project and show a teaser video clip. "It's the perfect place to show that pre-production footage for the first time, and possibly the only time it will ever be shown in public," he said.

If the backing comes together the way Ressmeyer hopes, filming would resume in early 2013, with the film's release set for 2014. Ressmeyer has also established a Visions of Tomorrow Foundation to move ahead with the agenda laid out in the movie, and he and his colleagues plan to use social-media crowdsourcing (and crowdsupporting) to keep hope alive.

Ressmeyer says that reviving hope in the future is the driving force behind "Visions of Tomorrow." During our interview, the 58-year-old photographer recalled the despair that he felt when doctors told him he suffered from juvenile diabetes, back in the days when many people saw that disease as a "virtual death sentence."

"My experience of being told at age 13 that I would be lucky to live 20 years led to a very, very major internal struggle between optimism and pessimism, idealism and cynicism, that in some ways continues to this day," he said. "All my life experiences have led to a vision and realization that hope is the force that drives planetary change — and there's a real shortage of that right now. 'Visions of Tomorrow' is designed to spread hope, to create confidence we can fix things."

Ressmeyer still has to fill in a lot of the blank spots in his vision, but do you think he's on the right track? What issues would you want to see addressed in a vision of tomorrow, and what bright ideas can you contribute? Please feel free to weigh in with your questions and solutions in the comment space below. I have a feeling that Ressmeyer will be watching.

More from Roger Ressmeyer:

• Audio slideshow: Voyage of the Millennium
• Buzz Aldrin plans the next giant leap
• 'Visions of Tomorrow' website

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Universal Studios

E.T. charmed Elliott (Henry Thomas) and millions of moviegoers in the 1982 movie "E.T.: The Extraterrestrial."

Thirty years ago, a different kind of alien hit the screen: a vulnerable, cuddly, candy-munching creature that captured hearts as well as box-office records. Is "E.T." still relevant for the 21st century? If you're looking for the extraterrestrial that humanity is most likely to run into first, E.T. definitely doesn't fit the mold. But if you're looking for the cultural icon that's most likely to motivate the search for honest-to-goodness extraterrestrials, E.T. just might be your A-list alien.

"If you look at the number of films that involve extraterrestrials these days, it's something like five or 10 a year," Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the California-based SETI Institute, told me today. "And most of them are kinda nasty. What I liked about E.T. is that, after all, he was just a botanist who came to Earth and played with the kids.

"He was a good tonic against the xenophobia we have about aliens. He's no more realistic than those other aliens, but his appeal encouraged folks to think that searches such as SETI were maybe not a bad thing."

SETI — the search for extraterrestrial intelligence — is Shostak's specialty. In addition to conducting decades of research in the field, he's written books about aliens, advised moviemakers about them, and hosts a radio show that often touches upon the search for alien signals. If an unrealistically cute and cuddly alien gets more people interested in the quest, that's just fine by him.

"Look, none of these movie aliens are realistic," he said. "Certainly all of the good guys are relatively anthropomorphic. You could analyze it in terms of the science ... but to me, all of the alien films stimulate the idea that there could be something out there. I can see that only as a good."

So what would a realistic alien look like? Probably more like R2-D2 than E.T.: Intelligence that's encased in metallic hardware will travel much better than the kind of intelligence that's carried around in relatively fragile wetware. R2-D2 could be pretty cute at times, but it's more likely that the real-life robo-aliens would be indifferent to our fate. To some extent, Shostak agrees with physicist Stephen Hawking: Our relationship with alien visitors might be similar to the Native Americans' relationship to the Europeans in the 1500s. In short, not all sweetness and light.

"If any were to come, at least extrapolating from the history of visitations here on Earth, most likely they would be nasty," Shostak said. "It wasn't the nice guys who got on the ship to visit the Aztecs."

But then again, perhaps E.T. suggests a sunnier scenario. Why would the aliens visit? Probably not for resources, because any civilization capable of coming to Earth would already command prodigious reserves of power. Certainly not for mating. Even if E.T. was made of flesh and blood rather than metal, the genetic code (and reproductive system) would be different. Perhaps, like E.T., the aliens would come just to catalog the flora, the fauna, maybe even check out the rock and roll.

"That might make sense," Shostak said.

What do you think? Is anyone else out there, or are we alone? How have our perspectives on extraterrestrial life evolved over the past 30 years? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

More perspectives on E.T. and "E.T.":

• Aliens won't eat us, and we won't mate with them
• Expert doubts aliens would visit Earth to terrorize us
• Stephen Hawking: Aliens may pose risks to Earth
• Steven Spielberg considered creepy 'E.T. sequel
• Henry Thomas recalls leaving Spielberg in tears
• Cosmic Log archive on aliens

Correction for 10:20 a.m. Oct. 10: Shostak said there were five or 10 alien-themed movies per year, but I mistyped the quote to make it sound as if E.T. got far less screen time. Sorry about the miscue, which has been mended. 

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Warner Bros.

Batman fires an electromagnetic pulse using an "EMP Blaster," one of the weapons introduced in "The Dark Knight Rises."

Maybe Batman couldn't swoop to safety using his cape as a glider, and maybe psychologists would question his sanity — but even Hollywood's superheroes have to pay some attention to scientific realities.

Striking the right balance between scientific plausibility and dramatic flair is one of the keys to a successful superhero movie, says James Kakalios, who teaches physics at the University of Minnesota and also serves as a consultant for movies such as "The Amazing Spider-Man."

"Hollywood creators appreciate our contributions, for they realize that when the audience is questioning the physics of what they are watching or the authenticity of the laboratory set, that's a moment when they are not paying attention to the story," he wrote in a commentary we published on msnbc.com earlier today.

Here's another angle related to science and technology: Superheroes get extra points on the fan scale if they handle high-tech gadgetry like the EMP Blaster and flying Bat vehicle featured in "The Dark Knight Rises." (We can gloss over the fact that electromagnetic pulses wouldn't be as well-behaved as they appear to be in the movie, or that the kind of propeller-driven Bat shown in the movie is pretty much aerodynamically impossible. And don't get me started on Wayne Enterprises' "clean-energy" fusion reactor.)

Over the past four years, the National Academy of Sciences' Science and Entertainment Exchange has been bringing scientists together with screenwriters, producers and other folks in the entertainment industry to make movies and TV shows more plausible on scientific grounds, if not 100 percent accurate.

Some gaffes slip through — ranging from the constellations in "Titanic" to the distance calculations in "Prometheus" — but the prime directive is to make a connection between real-life science and movie magic. The scientists probably derive more benefit than the filmmakers, because they can use those movies and TV shows as teachable moments. Even the gaffes provide grist for the mental mill.

In an email exchange, Kakalios delved into some of the issues he deals with as an adviser on superhero physics. Here's an edited transcript of the Q&A:

Cosmic Log: Do you find that the spate of superhero movies is sparking scientific studies like the recent one about Batman's cape? Are people more questioning of superpower science because they're seeing more such movies, or have they become inured to the fantasy? Can scientific believability make the difference between a good superhero movie and a bad one? 

James Kakalios: "There certainly have been a lot of superhero movies in the past few years — a Golden Age for Geeks!

"The studios have a vested interest in making sure that the general public is very familiar with these heroes — which opens the door for scientists to leverage this interest and promote real science. David Marshall's article is a good example of using the interest in the new 'Dark Knight Rises' film as a platform to discuss classical mechanics, which typically will not make it into the mainstream press. I also liked the argument from a few years ago which suggested that Superman's powers can be accounted for by a single miracle exception from the laws of nature, involving an ability to manipulate inertia.

"Interestingly enough, Hollywood has been coming to scientists more and more, and early in the scriptwriting process.  They will sometimes use the 'real' science behind the characters as the basis for story lines. The goal is not to make the films 100 percent scientifically accurate, which is beside the point of a fantasy film, but to make it accurate enough that the audience is willing to maintain their suspension of disbelief and become engaged in the story."

Q: You describe the process of translating real science into a "Decay Rate Algorithm" for the latest Spider-Man movie. Are there other aspects of "The Amazing Spider-Man" that you had a hand in enhancing, or at least steering clear of some of the things that strain plausibility?

A: "I discussed with the filmmakers the physics of wall-crawling, at least the way a gecko lizard does it.  I also talked about the fascinating materials science of spider's silk. It's a combination of rigid nanocrystallites for strength, connected by flexible polymers which can stretch, held in a long, fluid-filled channel which uniformly distributes the forces along the length of the webbing.

"Materials scientists would love to be able to mass-produce such webbing, for then we would be able to make lightweight clothing that is stronger than Kevlar. In the past, scientists have crossed a spider's web-making genes with goats, and have raised goats that synthesize spider's silk in their milk. A real-life example of cross-species genetics!"

Q: Are there typical challenges to scientific believability that are associated with specific characters? What would be Spider-Man's scientific Kryptonite?

A: "Spider-Man would have to worry about Teflon surfaces — they would be non-stick for him as well!  Geckos cling to walls through a weak electrostatic force called the Van der Waals attraction. using millions of microscopic fibers in their toes (called setae). Fluctuating charges in these fibers induce oppositely charged fluctuations in the wall. As opposites attract, the fiber is pulled towards the wall. The closer to the wall, the better — which is why the fiber is so small, in order to enhance its surface area-to-volume ratio. The force is very weak, which is why there are millions of fibers to provide sufficient force to hold the gecko up.

"But if the molecules in the walls are such that they resist inducing such fluctuating charges, then the force is inhibited. While artificial gecko tape does stick to Teflon, the van der Waals force is weaker than for other surfaces, and may not be strong enough to hold Spidey up. Whether this is the case or not, it is a great opportunity to discuss real, cutting-edge research in the context of a superhero movie!"

Q: Could you touch on any superpower-like technologies that you've come across in the most recent round of superhero movies?

A: "The first thing I can think of is Captain America's shield, which is a unique alloy of steel and ... Vibranium!  The steel gives it rigidity and strength, and the Vibranium is a made-up mineral in Marvel comics. Found in the African nation of Wakanda, it is extraterrestial in origin, and absorbs all vibrations!

"That makes it the ultimate shock absorber, capable of deflecting even a blow from Thor's hammer, as seen in this summer's 'Avengers' film. The clang we hear when Cap bounces his shield off an opponent thus answers an age-old question in science: What would it sound like if you struck an object which absorbs all vibrations?"

For more insights into superhero science, check out Kakalios' book, "The Physics of Superheroes" — and use your powerful vision to take in the videos and Web links below:

More about superhero science:

• How far off are real 'superhero' powers?
• You, too, can be Iron Man ... almost
• Physics in the realm of Hollywoodland
• The science of Superman

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

If we ever come across traces of an advanced alien civilization like the one featured in "Prometheus," the new semi-prequel to the "Alien" movie series, our first course of action should not be to send them a shipload of human meat. Instead, send in the robots.

At least that's the prescription from Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the California-based SETI Institute. "Would you indeed load up a starship with alien fodder and send it out?" he asked me. "Of course you wouldn't, because we don't know how to do that."

Sure, the crew of the starship Prometheus starts out in the year 2089, when we can assume that fusion power has solved our energy woes. But there's no chance that we'd be able to mount an interstellar trip by then, unless Spock and his pals from the planet Vulcan beam down and show us how. Even assuming that an ion-powered starship like the Prometheus could somehow get to other stars in a realistic (and relativistic) time frame, Shostak said he wouldn't send the humans on the first expedition to LV-223, the scene of the action in "Prometheus." 

"I think what you'd probably do is load up a spacecraft with sensors of all types, radio receivers, cameras, spectrometers, anything you can take up, essentially make it a Mars Viking mission, and just have it radio back what it finds," he said. "That's a heck of a lot less dangerous, and beyond that, it's a lot easier, because you don't have to put all this life support stuff and these cantankerous hominids on the rocket."

Even better, you could have that spaceship peopled by androids like David (played by Michael Fassbender in the movie), who basically steals the show in "Prometheus" anyway. That way, you avoid the ickiness of having monsters incubate inside human wetware, as they did in the original "Alien."

"If you can design an android that can do all the things that they do in these films, why is it that they haven't gone one step further and just replaced us with the androids?" Shostak asked. "Machinery can evolve much more quickly than biology. It's funny that they all get stunted at just the level where they're mostly helpful and occasionally malevolent."

Of course, without all that human cantankerousness and ickiness, you don't have much of a space horror movie. And be assured, there's plenty of both in "Prometheus." There's also a little real-life science in the movie, thanks in part to Kevin Hand, deputy chief scientist for solar system exploration at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Hand served as a consultant on the film, and one of the first things he learned is that you should never let scientific qualms get in the way of a good movie.

"Being a scientist working with filmmakers, you have to keep in mind that the story comes first," Hand told me. "The science is a way to motivate certain elements and provide aspects of the plot. As long as you go in with that understanding, as a scientist, you can let your guard down a bit and not be constrained — which is different from our normal day-to-day scientific metabolism."

With that in mind, here are five themes in the movie that include a twist of scientific realism:

Habitability: Early into his involvement, Hand gave film director Ridley Scott and his team a tutorial on the different environments in our own solar system, ranging from steaming-hot Venus to cold, dry Mars and ice-covered Europa and Enceladus. The setting for the movie, LV-223, is a moon that orbits a giant planet in its parent star's habitable zone. That's similar to the fictional moon in the movie "Avatar," which orbits a Jupiter-like world named Polyphemus. It might also be similar to the theoretical moons circling 55 Cancri f, a planet detected about 41 light-years from Earth.

Hand noted that LV-223 is habitable in the Earthlike sense, meaning that it has an atmosphere and could conceivably support life at the surface. But he thinks that most livable environments are less like Earth and more like Europa, a Jovian moon that is thought to have a miles-deep ocean of water hidden beneath its forbidding surface ice. "Much of the habitable real estate in the universe might be within these ocean worlds that are covered with ice," Hand said. By his reckoning, Earth would be the peculiar planet.

Panspermia: I hope I'm not giving anything away when I say that "Prometheus" touches on the theme of panspermia — the idea that the building blocks of life, if not life itself, can be transferred from one planet to another. It's a great sci-fi theme, but it's not necessarily science fiction. Some theorists have proposed that life could have gotten its start on Mars, which was warmer and wetter billions of years ago, and then hitchhiked its way to Earth on the debris thrown up from a meteor blast. Or life could have come to Earth from farther out in the cosmos, borne by an impacting comet.

Hand pointed out that NASA's Kepler mission has detected thousands of potential planets in just one little patch of sky. That leaves plenty of opportunities for finding life out there, and plenty of opportunities for life to make its way here.

"Here we are on Earth, a planet in a solar system around a star that is 4.6 billion years old, which seems like an incredibly long period of time to us," Hand said. "But the universe is 13.7 billion years old. So there was a lot of time before the solar system even came about, 8 billion years or so of the history of the universe, during which many forms of life, many advanced civilizations, could have come and gone. They could still be there now, or they could have died off billions of years ago."

Propulsion: The Prometheus starship uses an ion propulsion system that gives a nod to the real-life ion drives used by probes such as the Dawn spacecraft, which is currently in orbit around the asteroid Vesta, Hand said. "The spacecraft that they're using is a much more advanced version of that kind of propulsion, but it's got a link to our current mode of exploring the solar system," he said.

It's unlikely that ion propulsion will be able to provide the power and maneuverability that Prometheus has anytime soon, and certainly not by 2089. But ion drives could offer a good option for interplanetary or interstellar flight. Their hallmark is slow but steady acceleration, starting out with as much force as it takes to hold up a piece of paper. Unlike chemical rocket engines, ion propulsion drives keep going, and going, and going, building up a figurative head of steam. Some experts suggest that nuclear or solar electric ion propulsion will provide the oomph for eventual missions to Mars.

Mapping: In the film trailer, there's a scene where the away team tosses out a few flying robotic spheres that scan the underground caverns with lasers and send back mapping data. Hand said he couldn't take total credit for that idea, but the robo-balls are based on the same principle that Stone Aerospace is using to design real-life submersible robots capable of observing and mapping subglacial lakes in Antarctica or, perhaps eventually, on Europa. "I mentioned some of that work to the artistic team," Hand recalled. There's just one big difference: The real-world robot, known as the Deep Phreatic Thermal Explorer, or DEPTHX, will be "going through underwater environments on Earth as opposed to exploring alien spaceships," Hand said.

Terraforming: At one point in the movie, Prometheus' away team finds out that they can take off their helmets and breathe the air inside an underground cavern. Hand was asked to come up with a plausible explanation for that plot point, and he proposed that an alien civilization could easily come up with a nuclear-powered device that electrolyzes water to produce oxygen. Heck, even we puny humans are thinking of ways to use rock-eating microbes to make Mars more livable. It won't happen overnight ... but maybe it could happen by 2089, if we play our cards right.

"Prometheus" focuses on an expedition to go after to the aliens, but what if the aliens were of a mind to come after us? Should we lie low, as famed physicist Stephen Hawking has suggested? Unfortunately, it's too late for that, Shostak said.

"For any society that could come here to do nasty things to us ... it's very easy to show that they could pick up all the stuff we've been sending out since the Second World War. In fact, they could pick up the lights of New York City," he said. "In a sense, we've already told the aliens we're here. The idea that it might be dangerous if we found some planet over there, so don't send them anything ... it's too late. That's not to say it might or might not be dangerous. We have no idea. But it's too late. It's silly to worry about it, because it would require that you lay low not just for the weekend, but forever. Forever! That would so cramp the sorts of things that our descendants could do, that I don't think that policy would have legs."

And if the aliens really do come after us? If they have the capability to project their firepower over a distance of light-years, forget what you saw in the movie "Battleship." We're toast.

More about the search for alien civilizations:

• Expert doubts alien visitors would terrorize us
• Queen of SETI retires from research
• City lights could point to E.T.
• What if E.T. thinks we're evil?
• What would you ask E.T.?
• Cosmic Log archive on aliens

More Hollywood reality checks:

• Reality check on 'Hunger Games' tech
• Invisibility and other 'Harry Potter' technologies
• 'John Carter' and the real-life Martian quest
• Virtual actor takes over in 'Tron: Legacy'
• Apollo 18 in fiction and fact
• 'Avatar' and the future of 3-D moviemaking
• Reality check for 'Star Trek' tech

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.