The Atlantic How the Space Fantasy Became Banal The final frontier, as a setting, has long channeled giddy dreams of human communion. A new group of cultural works explores the opposite possibility. For All Mankind. During the Geneva Summit of 1985, as Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev attempted to negotiate their way out of the Cold War, the American president paused the proceedings, the lore goes, to pose a question. “What would you do if the United States were suddenly attacked by someone from outer space?” Reagan reportedly asked. “Would you help us?” “I said, ‘No doubt about it,’” Gorbachev later recalled. “He said, ‘We too.’” And the summit went on from there.