It’s now been nearly three years since James Cameron’s Avatar opened in theaters and proceeded to relocate a significant fraction of the world’s money into James Cameron’s secret money vault deep within the Mariana Trench. While the director has spent the intervening years tinkering with the Avatar sequels and acting like some sort of crazy, billionaire version of Jacques Cousteau, his presence is about to be back in the public eye again thanks to Titanic hitting Blu-ray and Avatar finally getting a 3D Blu-ray release here in the States. As part of this latest Cameron media offensive, Avatar producer Jon Landau has revealed a few new details on the upcoming sequels and whether we’ll ever get 3D conversions for Aliens and Terminator 2.

With so much of Cameron’s current filmmaking wrapped up in the world of 3D, it’s hard not to wonder if the director’s earlier classics might eventually get the 3D treatment as well. Collider broached that topic during a new interview, and Landau was enthusiastic but noncommittal. “I think, if we get through the next two Avatars, Jim would love to,” said the producer. “I think Jim really feels that the 3D enhances the storytelling process, and I think both of those movies would be ideal candidates to do this with.”

In 1986, James Cameron embarked on a mission to bring the sequel to Alien to life. It had been seven years since Ridley Scott terrified audiences with the first Alien film, and Cameron knew he had to do something different this time around. So he went into the production of Aliens with one thing in mind: creating the Alien Queen. With the help of visual effects genius Stan Winston, James Cameron expanded the Alien mythos and produced a movie that many consider to be one of the best science fiction films ever made.

James Cameron’s concept art for the Alien Queen.

Are you plagued by the sensation that your living room is missing that certain specific something? The single object that could, like The Dude’s rug, really bring the room together? While I haven’t actually seen your living room, I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that this custom-made Aliens xenomorph skull is what you’re looking for.

Is this gonna be a stand-up fight, sir, or another bug hunt?

Forget the harsh conditions of Mars and Jupiter’s frigid moons; the latest front-runner as a possible place to find alien life is Enceladus, a minuscule moon that orbits Saturn. With diameter of 310 miles, it’s little more than a glorified asteroid, but what it lacks in size, it makes up with geysers of liquid water, a mysterious inner source of heat, an atmosphere, and most incredibly—organic material.

Nasa astrobiologist Chris McKay claims that “it just about ticks every box you have when it comes to looking for life on another world, it has got liquid water, organic material and a source of heat. It is hard to think of anything more enticing short of receiving a radio signal from aliens on Enceladus telling us to come and get them.”

Scientists at Edinburgh University, the Imperial College London, and Nasa are bubbling over with excitement with what they believe may be a geothermal energy source akin to Earth’s deep sea vents that create the enormous plumes of water vapor, ice particles, and complex organic compounds that spurt up from a liquid underground ocean through cracks in Enceladus’s surface.

Astrobiologist Professor Charles Cockell of Edinburgh University proclaims: “If someone gave me several billion dollars to build whatever space probe I wanted, I would have no hesitation, I would construct one that could fly to Saturn and collect samples from Enceladus. I would go there rather than Mars or the icy moons of Jupiter, such as Europa, despite encouraging signs that they could support life. Primitive, bacteria-like lifeforms may indeed exist on these worlds but they are probably buried deep below their surfaces and will be difficult to access. On Enceladus, if there are lifeforms, they will be easy to pick up. They will be pouring into space.”

Over the years there are a lot of bizarre near-miss casting choices where a well-known role was nearly played by somebody else before going on to the final, iconic actor. Somewhere out there is a Bizarro dimension where Tom Selleck was Indiana Jones, Eric Stoltz stayed on for all three Back to the Future movies, and where one of my favorite all-time movie characters – Corporal Dwayne Hicks from Aliens — was played not by Michael Biehn, but by James Remar. Can’t picture that one? It would look a lot like this:

The frontier for scientific knowledge is expanding at a phenomenal rate. It’s hard to believe that less than 20 years ago, there was no evidence of extra solar planets even existing and yet now we have confirmed the existence of 783 of them, with thousands more waiting on conclusive data. It’s this seemingly exponential growth of knowledge in the realm of astronomy that leads astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell to believe that we will find the answer to that all important question, “Are we alone?” some time this century.

At the 5th Euroscience Open Forum conference in Dublin, Dr. Burnell announced her expectations that we should be seeing evidence of alien life very soon. According to DailyMail, Dr. Burnell  isn’t just hopeful that we’ll find evidence of alien biospheres, but that we might even stand a chance at spotting intelligent extraterrestrial life.  Dr. Burnell  isn’t some crackpot wearing a tinfoil beanie though, she is the respected astrophysicist who was responsible for discovering the first pulsar. In her opinion, governments and world leaders should already be working on plans for what to do when we finally find hard evidence for the existence of extra terrestrials. According to Dr. Burnell…

 I do suspect we are going to get signs of life elsewhere, maybe even intelligent life, within the next century.

How well prepared are we? Have we thought of how we approach them? Should we put them in a zoo, eat them, send in GIs to bring them democracy?