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Space

'If Aliens Contact Humanity, Who Decides What We Do Next?' (theguardian.com) 172

If humankind detects a message from an advanced civilisation, "It would be a transformative event for humankind," writes the Guardian, "one the world's nations are surely prepared for.

"Or are they?" "Look at the mess we made when Covid hit. We'd be like headless chickens," says Dr John Elliott, a computational linguist at the University of St Andrews. "We cannot afford to be ill-prepared, scientifically, socially, and politically rudderless, for an event that could happen at any time and which we cannot afford to mismanage."

This frank assessment of Earth's unreadiness for contact with life elsewhere underpins the creation of the Seti (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) post-detection hub at St Andrews. Over the next month or two, Elliott aims to bring together a core team of international researchers and affiliates. They will take on the job of getting ready: to analyse mysterious signals, or even artefacts, and work out every aspect of how we should respond.... "After the initial announcement, we'd be looking at societal impact, information dissemination, the media, the impact on religions and belief systems, the potential for disinformation, what analytical capabilities we'll need, and much more: having strategies in place, being transparent with everything we've discovered — what we know and what we do not know," says Elliott....

Lewis Dartnell, an astrobiologist and professor of science communication at the University of Westminster, said the new hub at St Andrews is "an important step in raising awareness at how ill-prepared we currently are" for detecting a signal from an alien civilisation. But he added that any intelligent aliens were likely to be hundreds if not thousands of light years away, meaning communication time would be on the scale of many centuries. "Even if we were to receive a signal tomorrow, we would have plenty of breathing space to assemble an international team of diverse experts to attempt to decipher the meaning of the message, and carefully consider how the Earth should respond, and even if we should.

"The bigger concern is to establish some form of international agreement to prevent capable individuals or private corporations from responding independently — before a consensus has formed on whether it is safe to respond at all, and what we would want to say as one planet," he said.

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'If Aliens Contact Humanity, Who Decides What We Do Next?'

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  • by jfdavis668 ( 1414919 ) on Saturday December 31, 2022 @04:37PM (#63170906)
    Just crowd source the solution.
    • Just crowd source the solution.

      (Alien) "Zeeble! Come quick! We're receiving a response from someone called...Fucky McFuckface..."

  • by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Saturday December 31, 2022 @04:38PM (#63170908)

    The three driving motivators for humankind are greed, fear and greed. Whoever gets contacted first will sell the rest out for some magical beans, shiny beads and the promise to die last.

    • You forgot about cats. Cats will save us somehow

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by fermion ( 181285 )
      Which is what we saw with Covid. We were prepared because those that would sell us out did not win and we in the US had good funding for the CDC and the NIH and the like. In the US the issue was that greedy bastards temporarily had control of government there was a focus on short term profit rather than long term health of the country. For example in Texas the government said Grandma should be happy to die so grandkids can go to the movies.

      However, in any reasonable scenario of alien visitation, we shoul

      • We hate each other enough that country A would gladly sell out country B, hey, we'd even help the aliens along to wipe them out. They're assholes anyway.

      • However, in any reasonable scenario of alien visitation, we should assume we will be extinct in a generation.

        Makes sense, by many orders of magnitude our strongest signals sent into space are the EMP from nuclear detonations.

      • Uhm, the only one who won COVID were tye pharmaceutical companies, they made billions of profit due to covid.
    • Owning thing is so last year. We'd get magical beans on a subscription plan in exchange for our resources and children.

      • You'd get a 20% discount for agreeing to back passage probing.

        • And you can keep that probe for free!

          It will remain in your rectum and tell everyone who wants to pay for that info what you ate and how often you're on the can, but IT IS FREE! TO KEEP!

  • by DrMrLordX ( 559371 ) on Saturday December 31, 2022 @04:39PM (#63170910)

    And you do not have control, especially not outside of your own borders. If someone from Russia were to make first contact, do you imagine that they'd honor some treaty pushed by the United States or Brussels?

    If the United States were to make first contact, should we bend a knee to China in determining our response? Or even consult with them? At all?

    We do not have a "one world" government, so there will not be a "one world" response. The best you can do is to prevent wildcats inside your own borders from doing something potentially-stupid.

    Furthermore, it is naive to assume that space-faring aliens would be stupid enough to deal with an individual party to the exclusion of all others. This isn't Contact.

    • by gtall ( 79522 )

      Aliens contact Moscow first:

      Putini: Wow! Hey, you folks euthanize Ukraine...for me, Russia military sucks.

      Alien: (*&(&^&$$&^

      Putini: That's yes, no?

      Alien: @%&$##*

      Putini: Remove U.S. from planet too.

      Alien: (*&&%%%*^ (hands Putini a present)

      Putini: Ah, gift for Savior of Russia!!!

      Alien: Is potato....(Blam...Putini's head disappears in puff of pink smoke)....Jesus, what a rube!

    • And you do not have control, especially not outside of your own borders. If someone from Russia were to make first contact, do you imagine that they'd honor some treaty pushed by the United States or Brussels?

      If the United States were to make first contact, should we bend a knee to China in determining our response? Or even consult with them? At all?

      We do not have a "one world" government, so there will not be a "one world" response. The best you can do is to prevent wildcats inside your own borders from doing something potentially-stupid.

      Furthermore, it is naive to assume that space-faring aliens would be stupid enough to deal with an individual party to the exclusion of all others. This isn't Contact.

      This might not be a problem.

      Looking at the history of... well, pretty much everywhere, we see a general trend towards consolidation into larger and larger social groups.

      Start with Chinese kingdoms, and unite into one large country. Or take a patchwork of feudal systems in Europe, and consolidate into nations, and eventually into a continent-wide European Union.

      Or note that England and southern Europe were essentially fortified cities (city-states), then small nations (Wales, Scotland, Britain, Ireland,

  • No need to worry (Score:5, Insightful)

    by OricAtmos48K ( 979353 ) on Saturday December 31, 2022 @04:42PM (#63170916)
    The Aliens will have a first-contact protocol.
    • The first contact protocol might be to launch a stealthed asteroid at 0.9 C at anything that replies. its the only way to be sure
  • We still have one. A handful of elites in the military and governments will make that decision. The Public's input will be limited to the possibility that they might riot over a certain decisions. That's basically how decisions that important get made.
    • Our ruling class is people from Harvard and Yale. They are the insiders, that's why they went to Harvard and Yale. And, as Larry Summers a former President of Harvard so aptly put it. "There are insiders and there are outsiders. Insiders don't listen to outsiders." But responding to aliens 100,000 light years away is probably not at the top of their list of important decisions they need to control. That leaves an opening for some lower rung power brokers to grab control.
    • Your ruling class is not the same as my ruling class. Who says your ruling class gets to speak for me? I don't.

      This is exactly the argument being made in the article. Who gets to speak for the entire human race?

      The President of the United States? The King of England? The Emperor of Japan? The Grand Imam of al-Azhar? The Dalai Lama? The Pope?

      None of them are my leader. They don't speak for me.

    • If the ruling elites do something that has the public rioting, the ruling elite may not want that as part of the first impression that the aliens get.

      Unless of course the aliens are fine with riots and destruction. :)

  • The various world governments will all think "Hey, let's put those trekkies from SETI in charge".

  • Any "intelligent" being that approaches our planet, would have the ability to listen and watch what is on the news, television, radio, movies, internet. That coupled with the "space junk" which looks like a "shield" around our planet, any INTELLIGENCE would steer clear!
    • Any "intelligent" being that approaches our planet, would have the ability to listen and watch what is on the news, television, radio, movies, internet. That coupled with the "space junk" which looks like a "shield" around our planet, any INTELLIGENCE would steer clear!

      Or exterminate. I guess that's one way to solve global warming ...

  • As soon as a civilization reaches the point of nuclear technology, it destroys itself in an inevitable nuclear war. It is so called the Civilization Bottleneck. Basically it is the only plausible explanation of the Great Silence in the universe of trillions stars and planets.
    • by sfcat ( 872532 )
      Nuclear weapons prevent war. That's why we call it the "Cold War" instead of WWIII. I do agree that we have so many naive people who think the way you do is part of why no aliens would ever want to visit us. Also, the radio waves we generate degrade to the point that they can't be detected in the background radiation after about 40 light years. There aren't very many planetary systems within that amount of space. Finally, there is inflation where (we think) that space is expanding all the time. So per
    • by CrimsonAvenger ( 580665 ) on Saturday December 31, 2022 @09:51PM (#63171532)

      Basically it is the only plausible explanation of the Great Silence in the universe of trillions stars and planets.

      Or maybe what they're using for communications is a bit beyond what we have. Keep in mind that modern communications here would be pretty much unintelligible (and undetectable) as recently as 100 years ago. Hell, if we could describe what we use now to someone in WW2, they'd still not be able to receive our signals in all likelihood.

    • That assumes the intelligence develops on a rocky planet with enough radioactive material in the upper crust to begin fission reactions capable of creating nuclear energy. If their society gets enough energy from other sources (think water planets, gas planets, frozen planets) then they might not have a nuclear stage and find a manageable energy source that isn't world destroying.

      They may have a similar civilization bottleneck by exhausting their own unique power sources (exotic salts, superconductive meth

  • The first thing we should send the aliens is a copy of our blockchains and offer to sell them some cryptocurrency. If they bite, we know they're not truly intelligent.
  • When life at the bottom of the oceans (Mariana Trench, etc.) discovered for the majority of people it had ZERO impact. "First" (sic.) contact will be no different. Most people will go "that's nice" and their life will continue exactly as it did the day before.

    Check back in 2050 when "We are not alone" will be common knowledge.

  • by Growlley ( 6732614 ) on Saturday December 31, 2022 @04:58PM (#63170946)
    at all.
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      It will probably be impossible to stop them. Chances are you won't need a special tachyon powered subspace transmitter to talk to them, anyone will be able to blast radio waves in their direction.

      I seem to recall the was a novel about that scenario, maybe by Arthur C Clarke. Someone sent the text of the Bible to a robotic probe visiting Earth, and the probe's logical AI tore it apart.

      • Maybe the new thing will be to bomb anyone building large transmitters. I mean we already do that to Iran when it wants to build nukes.

        It's possible that the arguement over who makes contact may actually lead to World War 3 on Earth.

    • I was discussing this with a theologian once. Abrahamic religions would "collapse" if extraterrestrial intelligent life was ever found. This is because God created *humans* in His own image. Nothing else. The mere existence of another being that would be on par with humans in terms of intelligence and technology conflicts with Genesis. Halfwits will be halfwits, I guess, but it's back to the drawing board for the lot of them if this happens.
  • Let's get real, we are not prepared to share this Earth with any alien civilization or anything that has not existed prior to us being here for that matter. Let's assume for a second, that COVID was a contact attempt of alien civilization. Certain proportion of the population rejected the payload and died. The rest had relatively few side effect. We acted as dumb, panicky dangerous animals guided by basic survival instincts in the process. We are not ready for "first contact" by any stretch of imagination.
  • by GameboyRMH ( 1153867 ) <gameboyrmh.gmail@com> on Saturday December 31, 2022 @05:09PM (#63170968) Journal

    The most irresponsible rash actor of a rich idiot who can buy access to a big transmitter. So, Elon Musk :-(

  • Ev-ry chicken has its head,
    Just like ev-ry investment has its payoff,
    Just like ev-ry government has it's big spooky eye,
    Ev-ry chicken has its head . . .
    Yes, it does

    Some nut with a PhD decides we need authoritarianism to deal with movie plot threats.

    News for nerds. Stuff that matters.

    /me drops mic

  • by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Saturday December 31, 2022 @05:13PM (#63170982)

    Space is big. There's nobody within travel distance. Everything you've read about 'nearby potentially habitable exoplanets' has been referring to rocky worlds tidally locked to their red dwarf parent star, and they're almost certainly NOT habitable.

    We're not even really set up to receive a signal from beyond the minimum likely distance it would come from, and we don't have the capability to signal back. It'd all be lost in the background noise.

    So OK... we somehow get a signal. It's probably going to come from 100 ly away. The very edge of our ability to send a coherent signal if we really wanted to. Very few could receive that signal (assuming reasonable limits on the transmitter, and that no alien civilization is going to devote all their available resources to signalling us).

    The people who could answer would need to build the required hardware first, and it's not going to be inexpensive. The people most likely able to build it are least motivated to do so, they have better things to do than join a conversation with a 200 year round trip lag time.

    But even if they built a transmitter and sent, "You bastards, now that we know you're there we're coming to exterminate you, pray to your God"... so what? We think we might be able to get up to maybe ~70% of c with an antimatter drive. So the aliens receive our threat and decide to respond - and arrive on Earth 240 years after the threat was sent.

    I know I'm losing sleep over that. (/s)

    • I have some concerns about the destruction of all humanity, even if it happens after I'm dead. Besides, the signal might be from an arriving spacecraft, not another solar system
  • If aliens come, THEY will decide who they want to contact.

    Same as we would do in their place.

  • No one would (Score:5, Interesting)

    by devslash0 ( 4203435 ) on Saturday December 31, 2022 @05:19PM (#63170996)

    The aliens would fly over, take what they need, wipe out those who oppose and move on to another planet. No questions asked. We'd be like ants when played with by humans. We'd be technologically incapable to respond or oppose in any way.

    • Re:No one would (Score:5, Insightful)

      by stabiesoft ( 733417 ) on Saturday December 31, 2022 @05:51PM (#63171068) Homepage
      Really this and I am always amazed people don't get that. Any creature that can traverse the vastness of space in anything less than millennia would consider us bugs at best. We need to get over ourselves. Nobody that advanced is going to come to a planet of annoying bugs for a holiday. And hopefully, they would not find us bugs a delicacy. Then we are screwed.
      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Primates can barely use tools, but we don't consider them "bugs". I think it's likely that she civilisation that reached the point where it can cross those distances would have developed a respect for life and recognize our sentience.

      • Any creature that can traverse the vastness of space in anything less than millennia would consider us bugs at best.

        That's not what the historical record suggests if the aliens are at all like humans (and if they are not you have nothing to do on and so no reason to make such an assumption). When Europeans encountered the North American tribes they saw them as primitive peoples who needed to be educated and not just as bugs.

        For them to regard us as bugs they would need to be hundreds of millions of years more advanced than we are and on that time scale, even restricted to sub-light speeds any civilisation would have

    • I dunno. I get the impression that any race advanced enough to travel through space to any meaningful degree will have "mountain eaters" capable of mining whatever they need from any old asteroid or planet. Space is mostly homogeneous, so targeting and invading Earth for precious materials doesn't seem to be particularly worthwhile.

      Maybe they'd want to colonize our planet if they can tolerate our atmosphere and climate... or this would be a popular tourist trap.

    • They may decide to kill all our leaders to "demoralise" us.

      Since most of our leaders are pretty self centered and not thinking of the general public, I think most of the public will celebrate the arrival of the aliens and for freeing us from entrenched interests.

  • Who is in charge now, mostly senile old fucks that have spent the majority of their life insulated from the real world while playing the game of politics

  • by OldMugwump ( 4760237 ) on Saturday December 31, 2022 @05:27PM (#63171016) Homepage

    "We" will do whatever each of us individually decides to do.

    Humans are not a hive species.

  • Luiz Ignacio "Lula" da Silva!
  • The episode "Pinewood Derby" summed up the cynical view of it, that we will lie and cheat to such a degree that we fail the test to be admitted to the greater community of the cosmos.

  • Everyone with a satellite dish they can aim can send a message back, and some will. Dozens in the US alone will even if the US government says not to. Some have bigger and more powerful dishes than others. I recommend continuously streaming Gilligan's Island.

    What SHOULD we do? They'll be able to stomp us flat until we've mastered nanotech and space travel and grown accustomed to it for at least thousands of years. Best hope is we aren't contacted by anyone for several thousands of years yet.

    • by XXongo ( 3986865 )

      Everyone with a satellite dish they can aim can send a message back, and some will

      ...with no effect whatsoever, since the effective isotopic radiated power from a satellite dish would be many orders of magnitude below the noise for any signal at interstellar distance.

    • Everyone with a satellite dish they can aim can send a message back, and some will.

      Nope. The inverse-square law means that the strongest signal ordinary equipment can send will be well below the noise floor at the nearest star. Free space path loss between Earth and Alpha Centauri @ 1 Ghz is over 360 dB. To overcome that, you need enormous antenna gain on both ends (say, Arecibo-sized), enormous transmission power (again, around Arecibo-sized) and tremendous receiver sensitivity. This is not something you can do with any ordinary satellite dish and transmitter.

  • We should invite some aliens over, then cook and eat some of them and see if they taste nice and are easily digestible. And are their hides and bones usable? Can living aliens be easily trained in useful tasks? Do they breed well in captivity? All basic stuff. Which they will probably be trying to do to us.

  • ... private corporations from responding independently ...

    Plenty of movies and stories postulate the government will seize all the technology they can and weaponize it. It's difficult to imagine "amoral" corporations acting differently. The result will be the Corporate Nation predicted in the movie Network, 1976.

    • by jwhyche ( 6192 )

      Weaponize what? You have been watching to many bad movies. I doubt very seriously that any message that we receive from another civilization will contain anything that we can "weaponize."

      Realistically, any message we do intercept will not be aimed at us. It will instead be simply the products of a technological civilization, just like the radar signals talked about in the article. The radar signals themselves contain no information in themselves. But what can be figured out from them is they are ar

  • The first step (should they be within a "short" distance) is to request scientific knowledge so that we can save our planet from it's impending devastation. It could be as simple as an efficient way to filter or split CO2 or as complex as how to design a high output fusion reactor. If they want to know us then surely they would help us.

    • by XXongo ( 3986865 )

      The first step (should they be within a "short" distance) is to request scientific knowledge so that we can save our planet from it's impending devastation.

      And in 200 years we'll get their answer: "stop burning fossil carbon sources."

  • by Tony Isaac ( 1301187 ) on Saturday December 31, 2022 @05:49PM (#63171062) Homepage

    Any species capable of traveling to earth, that wants to make contact with humans, will probably have done their homework. They will decide who to make contact with, and what they want to happen next.

  • ""The bigger concern is to establish some form of international agreement to prevent capable individuals or private corporations from responding independently — before a consensus has formed on whether it is safe to respond at all, and what we would want to say as one planet," he said. Talk about control freaks. Who cares who responds to a 100,000 year old message. Who thinks they can control what humans do over the next 100,000 years it will take for the response to be received. Assuming anyone is s
    • by XXongo ( 3986865 )

      ""The bigger concern is to establish some form of international agreement to prevent capable individuals or private corporations from responding independently — before a consensus has formed on whether it is safe to respond at all, and what we would want to say as one planet," he said.

      And the religious zealots will completely ignore this, of course, and will broadcast the gospel(s) at the highest power they are capable of.

      • I doubt it. By the time we get a message back there will be a new religion built around the aliens. Message from god you know.
  • by hdyoung ( 5182939 ) on Saturday December 31, 2022 @05:56PM (#63171080)
    An actual professor is standing up a center focused on this? Why? Seriously. Why? This has been thought through over and over and over again.

    Any alien civilization that has the capability to a) show up on our doorstep by FTL travel or b) open a line of communication to us through some FTL means. Either way, you’re talking about a civilization that’s so far ahead of us that they’ll have no reason to interact with us. When was the last time you attempted to communicate with the earthworms in your backyard?

    What could they possibly want with us or our planet? Resources? Don’t make me laugh. A species that advanced has definitely figured out robotics and nanotechnology. Infinite physical resources available from the nearest planet or asteroid belt. Maybe they want our ecosystem? For a species that advanced, terraforming would be trivial, but why bother when you can simply construct bespoke living habitats the size of small moons. Maybe they want our brains or bodies. We’re just a bunch of C, O, H, N, P, S and traces of the rest. If they have nanotechnology, biosynthesis will be trivial.

    Oh, wait, this isnt being done by hard science people. It’s being done by linguists and science COMMUNICATION types. Kudos to what they do, but I’m not gonna lose any sleep prepping for contact by our alien overlords. The two plausible scenarios are a) we don’t get contacted or b) they wipe us out a la “3-body problem” and we never even see it coming.
  • I would be scared to land for fear humans would try to eat me. Meat grown offworld is green right?
  • ... of course.

    Really disappointed that no one has mentioned Ye Wenjie [wikipedia.org].

  • In my book, Oumuamua was a Snark. We likely tried to shoot it down and failed. The whole thing was hushed up to appease political and religious powers. Take look around you. Can you honestly imagine that it would play out any other way?
  • by dargaud ( 518470 ) <<ten.duagradg> <ta> <2todhsals>> on Saturday December 31, 2022 @06:51PM (#63171196) Homepage
    I don't know how we should respond, but one thing I know for sure is that religious authorities should be cut out of the loop and told to shut the fuck up entirely.
  • Obviously, they decide! Given how advanced they must be to travel here, I doubt our opinion matters, including on what we do next.

  • ...and likely get us all killed.
  • by blackomegax ( 807080 ) on Saturday December 31, 2022 @09:08PM (#63171452) Journal
    > prevent capable individuals or private corporations from responding independently

    Tough for them. I'm already broadcasting all the hentai I possibly can into space in the hopes that aliens see it, and decide to visit us disguised as sex craved catgirls.
  • If a transmitter costs a few million then everybody and their dog is responding.

    If a transmitter is a few billion, and the speed of light holds true, then you get the US & EU trying to rally the big Democratic nations to make one decision while China teams up with Russia to be first to send.

    If the speed of light doesn't hold true then every power block is making their own transmitter as fast as possible because regardless of the risks there's massive benefits to being first.

  • As stupid as the UN is, I'd assume any global policies would come from them?
    • This. Instead of wondering if they have souls, we should be praying they think we do.

      • 'If Aliens Contact Humanity, Who Decides What We Do Next?'

        I dunno, but it should be an elected official, who will insinuate themselves anyway!

        Aliens scan his brain.

        Alien 1: "Oh, look. Another corrupt liar with the gift of gab."

        Alien 2: "Blow up the planet?"

        Alien 1: "Blow up the planet."

        This is based on the original decision on who to send in Contact, by the way.

  • Who are these so called researchers or even governments to decide who and how we respond? Maybe we should first just get rid of the whole country/borders idea and stop THAT nonsense. If we want to answer as one world, we first have to be one world.
  • by Eunomion ( 8640039 ) on Sunday January 01, 2023 @02:38AM (#63171826)
    Paranoia and utopian hippie nonsense would both flood the world. But then something else funny would happen: People would get bored and eventually just shrug it off. Developments on it would be reported after the sports scores and the weather.
  • ...if confronted by a tank? Likely an alien species advanced enough to visit us will be more likely to setup a concealed lookout spot not to scare the chinos or drive them mental over some shiny space laser. If they just want to talk they'll likely try to contact the most useful resource in the most non-disruptive way. If they wanted resources they'd just take them like humans setup industry regardless of wildlife. Who decides what we do? Likely they decide what we do - even if the decision is for us t

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