Who needs aliens? Humans are already creating things that are out of this world

It was only ten years ago that Apple launched the iPhone, an object that has surely changed how we interact more than any other in human history. The alien technology hypothesis is given further credibility if you bother to look inside a smartphone. Its complexity is staggering, and many of the materials you find there have properties that are so bizarre they seem to border on the magical.

Take the chemical element indium for example. It’s a metal so soft you can chew it, but if you combine it with tin and oxygen it turns into a transparent material almost completely unlike a metal, except that it still conducts electricity. Such transparent electrical conductors are extremely rare in the universe, but they are conveniently exactly what you need to make the touchscreen – which is central to the operation of a smartphone.

There are about a hundred different chemical elements in our universe, and more than half of those are used to make a smart phone. But it is one thing to retrieve these elements from the rock of our planet and be clever enough to combine them into a piece of futuristic technology. It is quite another to be able to un-make those objects to be able to retrieve the precious and marvelous materials.

Unfortunately for us and the other living organisms on our planet, we have singularly failed to master the ability to recover materials from our waste. As a result the seas are gradually filling up with plastic, the soil and water is being contaminated, and we are starting to run out of stuff. Well that’s not quite true. We’re running out of the easily exploitable reserves of the stuff we need.

Many of the materials we rely on are rare and getting them out of the rock is becoming increasingly expensive and energy intensive. So we are facing a future of having to mine deeper and more expensively to get the materials on which our modern way of life relies.

So what can we do? Either we need to find some aliens who have developed technology for recycling and extracting the precious materials from smart phones and other gadgets, or we will have to invent these technologies ourselves. I favour the latter but at present there is very little research being done.

Most businesses look only three to five years ahead and although it’s the role of governments to look further ahead, in practice they rarely do. The USA used to have the world’s largest reservoir of helium, a gas that has some incredibly properties when it is turned into a liquid. Now the reservoir is almost empty and yet it is this weird liquid helium that all hospitals rely on for cooling their MRI machines. Where our hospitals will source helium from in the future, and crucially how much it will cost, no one can tell you.