Every so often, over dinner with a journalist friend, we would play a game. We would name the three biggest stories that we wanted to write. The only trouble was, we had to stand them up.

Variously, we covered financial and political scandals and unsolved crimes. Always, the top one was the same. The hack in us meant we had a headline ready to go: “We are not alone”. 

We were referring of course to the discovery of aliens in space, that there are other beings in the galaxy apart from those on Earth. It was, we agreed, the biggest story of all.