Steven Spielberg asks some big questions in his new blockbuster, Disclosure Day. For example, how many plot holes can a film sustain before it transforms into a single, huge hole with some plot dusted around the edges? And if the huge hole generates hundreds of millions of dollars in just a few days, does that mean nothing can produce something? The biggest question, though, is the premise of the film: how would humanity react if it were revealed to us that aliens have been visiting Earth for decades and that we are not alone in the universe? Spielberg’s answer — and here be spoilers — is that we don’t know: this is a two-and-a-half-hour car chase followed by a very gripping opening scene and then the credits. Still, the glimpse we are given suggests that whatever Spielberg was going to tell us, is rooted deep in the 1980s: in his less cynical and fractured world, if you broadcast footage of aliens on big news outlets such as CNN and the BBC, every person on the planet will see it, believe that what they’ve been shown is true, and then immediately begin their awe-struck transition to a higher form of human consciousness. In its defence, it’s a celluloid fairy-tale by a master of gently manipulative whimsy. Nevertheless, the little glimpse Spielberg gives us of the first minutes of humanity’s response — uniformly earnest, credulous and introspective — got me thinking about how it might play out in a world that’s slightly more like the one you and I live in. For one thing, I suspect the response to the biggest revelation in history would be a lot noisier and politically more confused, not least as the counterculture completed a peculiar inversion. Those who were most likely to insist in the 1980s that aliens are real, now share angry posts on their ivermectin-themed WhatsApp groups explaining to each other that the new arrivals are obviously AI-generated fakes and yet another attempt by the Deep State to instil fear in the sheeple. There’d also be masses of anger, confusion, depression and grief — and that’s just me. Spielberg speculates that aliens might communicate in a language based on pure mathematics, which, I think, is a safe bet. But if they did, imagine for a moment the suffering of those who, like me, are absolutely rubbish at maths. Not only would we be relegated to remedial alien language classes, wretchedly and fruitlessly stabbing away at our calculators as we tried to work out the equation for “Howzit”, but consider how it would feel to discover that the universe contains potentially trillions of maths geniuses and that you are therefore at the bottom of the evolutionary ladder along with other organisms that can’t do maths, like slugs and ANC treasurers. Spielberg speculates that aliens might communicate in a language based on pure mathematics, which, I think, is a safe bet. But if they did, imagine for a moment the suffering of those who, like me, are absolutely rubbish at maths. Of course, there would be some benefits to befriending benevolent superbeings. Having access to interstellar spaceflight, for example, might encourage the tech bros to go and inflict progress on other planets, giving the rest of us a few years in which to catch our breath. At the very least the Joburg-Cape Town flight would be cut down to a few seconds, which is all I need to eat those food-adjacent muffins they sell you on Safair. It’s possible they’ve also perfected other technologies we desperately need, such as Apple chargers that last more than a year or cars that eject the driver the moment they start trying to reverse park. Still, the rancour would be overwhelming. Spielberg’s aliens seem to have the ability to create psychic connections with certain humans, downloading information into them, and if this were the case, I can imagine a great many humans would be horrified by the idea of having their minds controlled by aliens when everyone knows that’s the job of media owners. Even worse, if it emerged that our new friends weren’t interested in our resources and had perfected a moneyless civilisation without personal property, imagine the relentless headlines about Space Communists trying to destroy capitalism with their godless generosity. Disclosure Day ends with a powerful message for the viewer: you should have gone to The Devil Wears Prada 2 instead. But it also leaves us with the idea that the next evolutionary step for humanity is empathy. Or contact with aliens. Or… more car chases? Look, I’m getting confused, but the point is we should all try to be nicer to each other. Which is why, if you’re an alien reading this or downloading it from my consciousness, please, for the love of all things empathetic, stay the hell away from us. • Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.