Not long from now, the world's most sophisticated telescope dish will arrive in the barren Northern Cape landscape, where the Square Kilometre Array is coming together.
The SKA will be the world's largest radio telescope and is set to unravel the universe's secrets, including the most burning question of all: is there life beyond our planet?
The first prototype has been unveiled in China, and "a second dish, currently under production ... will be shipped to South Africa and assembled at the South African SKA site in the next few months", said an SKA statement.
It would "conduct real observations for the first time" to test its performance.But how will we feel if we find alien life? According to a new study, we'd be rather excited.
Michael Varnum, a psychology professor at Arizona State University who has looked into how we might react, said: "We would actually be pretty upbeat about it."
His pilot study used a software program to "quantify emotions, feelings, drives and other psychological states" that were clear in newspaper articles about past discoveries of potential extraterrestrial life.
He and fellow researchers then asked more than 500 participants to write about their hypothetical reactions to extraterrestrial life being discovered.
Varnum said the studies - recently published in Frontiers in Psychology - found that "if we find out we're not alone, we'll take the news rather well".
In popular culture, however, alien life has often been portrayed as the stuff of nightmares. University of Cape Town film and TV studies expert Ian-Malcolm Rijsdijk said: "Aliens on the big screen have often been framed in oppositional terms where the aliens are invaders attempting to overwhelm Earth, either through brute military force or through infiltration."
They were also sometimes seen as metaphors in our own sociopolitical contexts.
"Famously, the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers [film] was interpreted as both anti-communist and anti-McCarthyite as strange pods quietly captured the inhabitants of a small town and produced drone-like replicas in their place," said Rijsdijk.
One of the most "overlooked" alien films was The Brother From Another Planet, in which a black alien is puzzled by the prejudice he experiences on Earth as he is chased around New York by white humanoid agents from his home planet...