The Visitor from Planet X
When I was a kid I read the Tom Swift book The Visitor from Planet X (fulltext on Gutenberg) and even then I thought it was ridiculous. Tom Swift makes freakin’ extraterrestrial contact but then spends most of his time combating the evil Brungarians who are trying to abduct the Visitor.
Here’s how it goes: Tom gets a message from Planet X notifying him that a visitor made of “pure energy” is on the way. Tom’s job is to make a mechanical body for it to inhabit. This he does, and for some reason it looks like a Christmas tree. The energy duly arrives in the body and they celebrate, as you can see in the illustration.

Illustration from “Tom Swift and the Visitor From Planet X.”
(I find this an exceptionally weird drawing, by the way. It looks like they’ve formed a cult.)
Great buildup, but after that the Visitor is quite the disappointment. All it does is move around the lab crashing into things, and emits terse sentences like DANGER NEAR. BRUNGARIAN SCIENTISTS READY TO DESTROY ME.
That’s it. No conversations about alien biology, technology, ideas, art, science, or ways of life. Tom never asks the alien where it came from. Or what it thinks of Earth. Even though I was 12 years old, I felt gypped. What a failure of imagination. I think it shaped my adolescence, actually: it gave me the belief that the grownups never tell you the really good stuff.
Admittedly, the Visitor had its priorities straight: survival first. It is impressively clear about its political allegiances:
DO NOT WORRY, MY FRIENDS. I WILL NOT RESPOND TO ANY ATTEMPTS BY BRUNGARIAN SCIENTISTS TO COMMUNICATE WITH ME. MY PLANET IS WELL AWARE OF THEIR DANGEROUS AIMS. HAVING CONQUERED YOUR WORLD, THEY WOULD NEXT INVADE SPACE.
This is sort of like an American taking sides between the House of Lancaster and the House of York during the Wars of the Roses in the late 1400s.
But The Visitor from Planet X actually had the seed of a good idea. At our current level of technology, physical travel between stars is out of the question. But what if the program for an AI could be sent instead? Why not send the code and database of an AI such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini?
Naturally, there’s a lot of assumptions being made here. That the aliens will have computers; that the aliens will understand that the message is a computer program; that the aliens will be able to translate it into code that runs on their computers. If you can get past all that—voila!
(Efforts have been made on the problem of interoperability, though I don’t pretend to understand them. There’s a CosmicOS that an alien recipient can supposedly boot up after digesting a primer. According to the CosmicOS website, an alien user “is free to play around with the simulated world and understand its logic through experimentation.”)
If such problems can be solved, sending an AI might actually be feasible. While AIs are trained on a huge database of information (essentially the entire content of the Internet, plus millions of digitized books) the size of the LLM itself, after that training, is much smaller.
Instead of the data itself, it consists of the patterns, relationships, and probabilities the AI has derived. Whereas the training data runs to several hundred terabytes, the data constituting the AI itself takes up only several hundred gigabytes. That would fit on a maxed-out iPhone 16.
So if the problem of communicating the implementation details could be solved, then the solution would be to…send ChatGPT. It’d be able to talk fairly realistically with its hosts, once they figured out English (or any human language.)
And if the aliens sent it back once it had learned about them, it could communicate what it had learned to us.
Now that would be a real emissary. Decades or centuries would pass on Earth while we waited, but it’d still be far faster than physical spacecraft.
And if we ever develop genuinely intelligent AIs, ones with self-consciousness and sensations? To such programs, the journey there and back would take place in a subjective eyeblink. If I was an AI, I would find this insanely exciting. A whole world of aliens to explore!
That’s all a lot of ifs. But that could be how we will someday create a real Visitor to Planet X.