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Professor Chris Thomas is a biologist at the University of York who believes that alien species of plants and animals can make a positive impact on native communities. While a great deal of money has been spent world-wide trying to get rid of non-native plants and animals, Chris argues this fear is irrational, and that for instance Britain appears virtually immune to extinctions from imported species. Moreover, he suggests the UK could become an ideal rescue place for endangered species from elsewhere.聽

Nnedi Okorafor is an award winning Nigerian-American science fiction writer, and a Professor of Creative Writing at the University at Buffalo, New York. She discusses her latest book "Lagoon", a science fiction novel about an alien invasion, set in the聽Nigerian聽city of Lagos. In her portrayal of aliens, Nnedi says she wanted to challenge our arrogant belief that we would recognise and understand aliens if we were to encounter them, by showing they could be quite different from anything we can predict.聽

Professor Richard McNally is from the Psychology Department at Harvard Medical School and a world expert on anxiety disorders. He tells us about his studies of sincere non-psychotic people who believe that while they slept they were abducted by aliens. He argues that this is very likely a result of sleep paralysis and is connected to false memory syndrome. He also believes these 鈥渁bductees鈥� tend to be very creative and spiritual people.

Nnedi Okorafor imagines digital alien personalities that would evolve from our artificial intelligence programmes, and become our new personal assistants. They could be made to permeate our mobile phones and would be like normal thinking beings who advising us on all issues in our lives, from booking flights to relationship problems.聽聽