Extraterrestrials

Extraterrestrials are never confirmed by the evidence presented here; instead, their imagined presence becomes a test of how people distinguish investigation from belief. A sterile sampler containing only air frustrates Arvind Acharya’s hope of proving life beyond Earth, while the Giant Ear is redirected toward listening for distant civilizations and a public speaker claims that aliens shaped ancient Indian history. The beings remain out of reach, but the struggle over what might count as evidence changes both scientific priorities and public conversation.

Scientific promise and the failed sample

The Balloon Mission gives the possibility of Extraterrestrials a material, testable form. Arvind Acharya imagines that objects falling through the atmosphere can be trapped in samplers and examined, and, after disappointing news from Cardiff, insists that more balloons can be sent aloft. The plan is not presented as a completed discovery: it is a promise of repeated attempts, with future samples meant to establish the presence of aliens beyond dispute.

That hope depends on the sampler. When Oparna Goshmaulik tells him that it held nothing but air, the result closes off the proof he wanted from this mission. Acharya is distressed not only by the failed search but by the loss of the prospect that he had found aliens in the stratosphere. He suspects he may not get another opportunity and confronts, for the first time, the fear of a vacant future. The scene makes the scientific claim inseparable from personal expectation: the empty instrument does not establish that Extraterrestrials do not exist, but it does defeat the evidence on which Acharya had pinned this particular discovery.

The sampler’s emptiness also sets a sharp limit on what the story allows its characters to claim. Acharya can propose another launch and retain his conviction that something may be found, but the sample itself supplies no organism or other confirmation. The difference between a hoped-for result and an observed one is therefore central: Extraterrestrials remain a possibility under investigation, not a finding secured by the Balloon Mission.

A search made institutional

A different approach to the same possibility appears when Jana Nambodri announces that the Giant Ear has been liberated to scan the skies for signals from advanced civilizations. The array of radio telescopes shifts the search from collecting material falling through the atmosphere to listening for communications across space. At the public gathering, the announcement is greeted with great applause, and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence is presented as a newly authorized national undertaking.

The announcement quickly takes on a life beyond the instruments. Scientists from other institutes arrive, seminars and lectures follow, journalists come to learn about the program, and schoolteachers request visits to the telescopes. The search is described as a revolution whose time has come, although the excitement is about the right to pursue it and the future it promises, not about a detected signal. Extraterrestrials thus become the object around which a scientific program and its public constituency can gather, even while their existence remains unproved.

The contrast with Acharya’s balloon work is telling. His proposed proof rests on a physical sample that can be inspected; the Giant Ear represents an organized search for signs of distant intelligence. Neither episode supplies a confirmed encounter. Instead, the institutional change makes the question newly audible in public life: the search gains equipment, access, audiences, and prestige before it gains an answer.

Ancient contact as public spectacle

At the same gathering, a retired scientist from Bangalore turns the prospect of Extraterrestrials into an explanation of ancient Indian achievements. He claims that contact occurred in the Vedic age, that the Mahabharata’s flying machines and mystical missiles reflect extraterrestrial technology, and that Indian gods are artistic representations of alien visitors. He goes further, asserting that Krishna was an alien. These claims are delivered as a confident account of the past, but the scene offers no supporting evidence for them; their force comes from their performance before an audience.

The audience gives the speech a long round of applause. The men onstage rise and join in, somewhat sheepishly, as the moment gathers force. Ayyan Mani laughs at the speaker’s accompanying boasts about ancient Indian superiority, which include claims about science, medicine, and the sacred cow. For Ayyan, the story of glorious ancestors is also an exclusionary one: his own ancestors have no place in that imagined heritage except as monstrous figures in old fables. The alien-contact theory therefore joins a spectacle of national pride that presents a grand past without establishing the truth of its claims.

Ayyan’s response also gives the scene its pointed comparison with Arvind Acharya. Amid the applause, Ayyan misses Acharya and remembers that he fought against precisely this kind of unsupported assertion. The pursuit of truth seems less ridiculous to Ayyan when Acharya leads it; the newly celebrated search appears diminished when separated from that commitment. The passage distinguishes the existence of a search for Extraterrestrials from the easy conversion of alien possibility into a story that flatters its audience.

An absent presence

Across these episodes, Extraterrestrials occupy several different positions: they are the hoped-for occupants of a sampler, the possible source of signals sought by radio telescopes, and the supposed visitors recast as gods in a speech about antiquity. None of these roles amounts to confirmation. The sampler contains only air, the Giant Ear is announced as ready to search rather than as having received a message, and the ancient-contact account is met with applause rather than tested evidence.

That repeated gap between assertion and proof gives the beings their narrative significance. Their absence does not make the search meaningless: it exposes how scientific methods, institutional authority, personal ambition, and collective myth shape the claims made in their name. The book keeps the question open while making the standards of each answer visible. In the most consequential contrast, disciplined inquiry requires waiting for evidence, whereas public certainty can arrive with a speech and a round of applause.