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Note: Spoilers ahead if you haven't seen the first "Independence Day" movie.
The first trailer for the "Independence Day" sequel, called "Independence Day: Resurgence," made a surprise debut during a football game on December 13.
It looks like pretty bad news for Earth: The alien invaders are back and eager as ever to wipe out humanity.
While it's easy to mock the existence of intelligent aliens, the idea is plausible: There are billions of other stars in our galaxy alone, and our galaxy is just one of billions in the observable universe. In fact it's rather unsettling that we haven't yet made contact.
In the case of "Resurgence," however, senior astronomer Seth Shostak from the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute says there are a few reasons you can breathe easy.
Shostak thinks the alien invasion scenario for the first "Independence Day" is not only highly unlikely, but also the plot of its sequel is even less likely to happen.
For starters, it's doubtful that an alien race would show up at Earth at all, Shostak says.
"For them to transport themselves from light-years away, a journey that could take millions of years (unless they've figured out some physics that we don't understand yet), we'd have to have something that they really want," he told Tech Insider. "You wouldn't go to Siberia just for lunch. You'd need a really good reason."
Unspecified "resources" on Earth are the reason the aliens show up in the first "Independence Day." Yet Shostak said that's a load of bologna; the Earth doesn't have anything especially valuable that isn't found on other worlds.
Our solar system, and likely the whole universe, is filled with water and minerals. So there's really nothing unique to draw aliens here. At best they would be interested in studying life or in converting us to the "galactic church"— sort of like missionaries to the new world during the colonial days, Shostak said — but if that were the case they probably wouldn't show up with guns blazing.
Yet suppose that we haven't met any aliens because a nasty, super-aggressive species rules the galaxy and is going around crushing every other form of intelligent life that it detects. And that we haven't heard from any other aliens because everyone else is trying to stay silent and hidden — or they're dead.
Maybe the aliens in "Independence Day" is that killer species, and that's why they show up at Earth...
Shostak doesn't buy this idea, either.
If the universe is about 13 billion years old, then the odds suggest that any aliens out there are either millions or billions of years more primitive than us, or millions or billions of years way more advanced than us. Primitive aliens won't know we exist, and more advanced aliens won't care — wiping us out wouldn't be cost-effective, Shostak said.
He also thinks the chances of an alien species, let alone an aggressive one, being on the exact same evolutionary timeline as humans today is slim.
"It would be like walking out onto the streets of Manhattan, picking a random person, and finding out they were born the same day, the same year, and the same hour as you," Shostak said.
But Shostak said there's an even bigger problem with the sequel.
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In the first movie, the human race defeats the aliens by implanting a virus in their spaceship, forcing the aliens to leave. In the sequel, it appears they're coming back for round two.
First of all, Shostak said, the humans should not have won round one. Destroying advanced alien technology with a human-made computer virus would be like trying to infect a modern computer with software made in the 70s, Shostak said.
"If an alien race is advanced enough to get all the way here, then whatever they want to do, they can do," Shostak said. "It would be like neanderthals trying to defend themselves against the US Air Force."
Second of all, even if we did manage to win round one, the aliens would have no cause to return unless they found something valuable the first time, Shostak said.
All that said, the new movie still looks like it's going to be fun to watch. Here's the first full trailer:
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