When your bike or car needs a tune-up, it’s easy enough to bring it down to a repair shop. But if your vehicle is hurtling through orbit, hundreds of kilometers above the planet, it’s a lot trickier to arrange a maintenance check or refueling operation.

NASA intends to tackle this challenge with its Restore-L spacecraft, which is designed to grasp, repair, gas up, and re-deploy its fellow orbiting robots. On Monday, the agency announced that it would award a $127 million contract to the private satellite company Space Systems/Loral of Palo Alto, California, to build this orbital helper bot in time for a projected launch in 2020. This maiden flight of the Restore-L will test out the spacecraft’s ability to rendezvous with and subsequently service a government asset in orbit.

READ MORE: To Clean Up Dangerous Orbital Trash, We May Need Space Harpoons and Satellite Claws

"Restore-L effectively breaks the paradigm of one-and-done spacecraft," said Frank Cepollina, the associate director of NASA Goddard’s Satellite Servicing Capabilities Office (SSCO), in a statement.

"It introduces new ways to robotically manage, upgrade, and prolong the lifespans of our costly orbiting national assets. By doing so, Restore-L opens up expanded options for more resilient, efficient, and cost-effective operations in space," he added.

If successful, Restore-L could also lend its talents to other endeavors, like cleaning up space debris or testing out asteroid capture platforms. It’s also the latest example of NASA partnering with the private sector to reduce operation costs and diversify America’s spacefaring portfolio.

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Released in US theatres just a week ago, Arrival is quickly shaping up to be the science fiction movie of the year, a turn of events that almost no one—including the author himself—would’ve guessed based on its premise.

The story follows linguist Louise Banks (played by Amy Adams) and theoretical physicist Ian Donnelly (played by Jeremy Renner) as they attempt to communicate with a pair of extraterrestrials whose spacecraft has just landed in Montana. For most of us, Arrival was just another entertaining alien flick, but for a handful of Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) researchers who are actually tasked with figuring out how to communicate with extraterrestrials, the film felt more like a documentary than a drama.

“I am so envious of Louise Banks because she gets to have a face to face with ET,” Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI) International president Douglas Vakoch told Motherboard. “But in the scenarios that SETI and METI folks deal with there’s no possibility of that. Our idea of a snappy exchange with extraterrestrials is a decade—and that only works if the nearest star is populated.”

Prior to becoming the president of the recently founded METI International, which focuses on the controversial science of sending messages into space, Vakoch was the Director of Interstellar Message Composition at the SETI Institute in California. For a large part of his career, he has been trying to figure out how to communicate with an intelligent extraterrestrial species when you don’t even know the first thing about them and a message takes decades to reach its destination.

Although Amy Adams’ character makes it look easy in Arrival, the real art and science of talking to aliens—known as astrolinguistics or METI—is much more complicated, involving a healthy mix of linguistics, mathematics, physics, and imagination.

In Arrival, Renner’s character ribs Adams for her approach to communicating with the aliens, telling her that she does linguistics “like a mathematician.” Although this throwaway comment was made in jest, in real life that’s more or less how it’s done. As Vakoch pointed out, one of the luxuries enjoyed by Adams in the film is that she is able to communicate in real time with the aliens. But for the METI researchers sending messages into the cosmos, they are expecting decades—if not centuries—to elapse between sending a message and receiving a response, which fundamentally changes the way they think about constructing a message.

In the first place, it means that a message sent into the cosmos needs to be incredibly robust and ideally entirely self-referential. Unlike Arrival, Earthlings don’t have the ability to teach the recipients of their messages anything about it because the delay in communication is so long. So not only do METI researchers have to send the content of the message, but they also have to send instructions for how to read it, and these instructions must somehow be intelligible to the aliens as well.

What this means is that rather than trying to figure out how the structure of an alien’s language might uniquely shape their worldview (the theoretical basis of Arrival known as linguistic relativism) and basing a message off of that, METI researchers go in the opposite direction.

“We're looking for a cosmic Rosetta stone,” said Vakoch. “But the question is: What do us and the extraterrestrials both have in common?”

As you might expect, this question leads most METI researchers to languages rooted in mathematics and physics, which one would expect to be known to an alien civilization capable of mastering the technology to receive our message in the first place.

When a 20th century Dutch mathematician named Hans Freudenthal created LINCOS, the first language expressly designed for communicating with extraterrestrials, he used mathematical principles to discuss everything from the nature of time to what it means to love. In 2013, a Dutch mathematical astronomer named Alexander Ollongren created a second version of LINCOS, which communicates similar ideas couched in the language of symbolic logic and lambda calculus. In both of these instances, the lingua cosmica is self-contained and rooted in supposedly universal principles (mathematics and logic)—but it still might be unintelligible to an alien.

“Even if humans and extraterrestrials both have math and science, they're not necessarily interchangeable,” said Vakoch. “Maybe science starts out at different places depending on the biology or particular needs of the organism. There is a subtle truth that Arrival points toward, and that is the way we construct and talk about the world may reflect something idiosyncratic about our species.”

To illustrate his point, Vakoch cites the emergence of non-Euclidean geometry in the 19th century. For two millennia, Euclid’s view of a flat universe reigned supreme and pivoted on his fifth postulate, which states that two parallel lines will never intersect. But when a handful of European geometers in the 1800s replaced this axiom with its opposite—that two parallel lines actually can intersect—they fundamentally changed our view of reality by making space curved instead of flat.

The important point is that both geometries are internally consistent and have been used for innumerable scientific and mathematical discoveries. So just because we’re speaking the language of science or math to aliens doesn’t necessarily mean we’re talking about the same science and math.

With this in mind, Vakoch advocates for exploring dozens of different ways of trying to communicate with ET. He thinks that the idea of trying to create a self-contained message that can be delivered all at once is a product of the human desire to see a send and reply happen within one generation. If we abandon this idea and accept that interstellar communication is likely to happen over the course of centuries or millennia, it opens up radically new ways of attempting to establish communication with aliens.

The Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico was used to send the first message into space.

Image: Meredith P./Flickr

In the half a century that elapsed between the first and second versions of LINCOS, there have been no shortage of ideas for how to talk to extraterrestrials. Some have relied on aural or visual components, such as the Voyager spacecraft which contained sound and images on a record. Likewise the first radio communication intended for aliens, known as the Arecibo message, was also an image which depicted pixelated humans and the Arecibo telescope. Unfortunately, these types of messages are banking on the idea that aliens will have aural and visual systems like us—but given that sight has independently evolved dozens of times on Earth alone, this idea might not be as farfetched as it seems.

Other common ideas take the form of massive data dumps or sending out computer programs that will be capable of being run by the aliens once they’ve got a basic grip on human coding paradigms. This was the idea behind CosmicOS, a computer program that would essentially use a role-playing game to teach aliens about Earth and that one time the entirety of Craigslist was sent into the cosmos (more of a publicity stunt than anything, but maybe aliens need a new divan?). Other strategies go back to hard science, like the RuBisCo Stars message which sent the DNA sequence for the protein used in plants for photosynthesis.

Whether any of these signals will ever reach or be intelligible to extraterrestrials is impossible to say, which is why Vakoch and his colleagues at METI International are focusing on exploring as many different message constructions as possible in the meantime. They hope to begin transmitting messages into the cosmos by the end of 2018, but for now the important thing is to have an open mind and active imagination, which for Vakoch is one of the main takeaways from Arrival.

“The thing I most liked about Arrival is that it captures the sort of openness to a new way of understanding the nature of reality that we need to be capable of to understand another civilization,” said Vakoch. “That's what we hope for in SETI and METI: that over the course of decades or centuries we’ll be able to come to understand how another civilization understands and talks about its world.”

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Christo Roppolo was eight years old when he was contacted by aliens for the first time.

He was at home with his younger brother when a creature that looked like Bullwinkle emerged from a glowing ambulance and pressed itself against the window of his bedroom. When he regained consciousness, his parents were in the room arguing with one another and his younger brother had smeared soiled diapers all over the living room window, as if in attempt to keep something out.

“[The alien] told me it was going to give me a little bite on the nose, but when I woke up everything would be okay,” Roppolo told Motherboard. “For a long time after that, I didn’t even want to go to sleep, but as a kid I didn’t place too much significance on what had happened. As I got older, I started to realize that it wasn’t just a dream.”

Today, Roppolo is 57 years old and resides in Monterey, California, an idyllic coastal city about 6 hours north of Los Angeles. Although thousands of miles and five decades separate Roppolo from his childhood home in the suburbs of Cleveland, the extraterrestrial encounters never stopped. But instead of freaking out that the aliens were trying to contact him, Roppolo did what any filmmaker would do—he grabbed his video camera and started shooting his encounters.

When Roppolo reached out to Justin Gaar, a filmmaker newly arrived in Los Angeles, he had dozens of hours of UFO footage he had filmed around Monterey. Roppolo was trying to make a movie out of this footage, but was dissatisfied with the cut that had been given to him by his previous editor. He found Gaar through the friend of a friend who worked as a sales rep at the company from which Roppolo would order synthesizers to make his otherworldly electronica music.

“I honestly watched maybe an hour’s worth [of Roppolo’s footage] and was like what is this?” Garr told Motherboard. “It's really just hours and hours of him going 'what the fuck is that fucking shit?' and pointing at blinking dots in the sky. My mind wasn't entirely open to what it was.”

Garr told Roppolo he didn’t see anything in the footage and made some suggestions for how he could improve his filmmaking, but didn’t really anticipate getting involved in the project. Yet as Garr continued to received new footage from Roppolo, some of it featuring himself, he was eventually persuaded to meet with Roppolo in Los Angeles to discuss his UFO sightings.

It’s their experiences together that make up the footage of Gaar’s latest film, Curse of the Man Who Sees UFOs, which was released on Tuesday.

Christo Roppolo in Monterey.

Image: Virgil Films

“We went to dinner and the whole time [Roppolo] is looking up at the sky for stuff,” said Garr. “He’d keep talking about UFOs and aliens as if they're right there with us in the room. The he told me about his family and I knew there was a narrative here.”

Roppolo’s troubled past really began when his dad was killed in a drunk driving accident while Roppolo was working his way through culinary school. His father was the only person Roppolo ever felt close to in his family and was the person who had originally sparked his passion for filmmaking when he took Roppolo to see the Godfather in theatres.

"He’d keep talking about UFOs and aliens as if they're right there with us in the room. The he told me about his family and I knew there was a narrative here."

After the accident, Roppolo and his brother came into a significant sum of money as a result of the settlement. His brother squandered it on land in the American south and soon went bankrupt. Roppolo spent a portion of his money on filmmaking equipment and with $10,000 produced his first major film, a remake of the classic 1964 gore film, The Flesh Eaters.

The film was decently well received, but shortly after its release Roppolo learned that his brother had stolen $129,000 from his bank account and disappeared. Amazingly, this would soon turn out to be just the tip of the iceberg on Roppolo’s downward slide.

After a series of increasingly tragic events, Roppolo’s life was a mere fragment of what it had been only a decade before—and that’s when the UFOs really started showing themselves to him.

“[The frequency of their appearances] depends on whether or not I’m signaling them,” Roppolo explained. “That’s something I just started doing after studying the footage I had on camera and saw [the UFOs] were blinking at each other. If you signal them with prime numbers and do it in sets of three, they’ll show up.”

Yet for Gaar, there seemed to be a different sort of connection between the sightings.

“Whenever [Roppolo] was having emotional trauma in his life, it was always reflected in his ability to find the UFOs,” Gaar said. “I sort of hypothesized that maybe some of this is psychological, but then also I don't know what the fuck that stuff is that he's videotaping. Some of it you can immediately write off and some of it is really hard to reason through.”

Although Gaar was only able to find breaks from work to visit Roppolo on occasion during the two years it took to film Curse of the Man Who Sees UFOs, he was still treated to a few UFO sightings himself. The strangest sighting, which is detailed in the film, is still inexplicable to Gaar and he has little interest in trying to get to the bottom of it.

Christo Roppolo and one of his dogs.

Image: Virgil Films

“I didn't end up pursuing this, but I had a theory about a couple of the sightings,” said Gaar. “There are military installations near [Roppolo] and Lockheed Martin's Skunkworks—a pretty secret experimental aviation place—is located only so far south of Monterey. So I was going to get kind of scientific with it, but decided not to. The film was never about that.”

After everything is said and done, Curse of the Man Who Sees UFOs is a documentary that is less about unidentified flying objects than the man who spends his nights looking up at the cosmos. Remarkable for the depth of its comedy and tragedy, it is one of the most poignant documentaries to be released this year. Although Gaar remains a skeptic about UFOs and leaves the legitimacy of the sightings up to the viewer to decide, for Roppolo there was never an option not to believe.

“Until the last breath of my life I will be making sure that people know this is no bullshit,” Roppolo said. “From the bottom of my heart: it’s all real.”

Curse of the Man Who Sees UFOs is available on DVD and iTunes on Tuesday, December 6.