What comes after “we come in peace”?
A group of scientists dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, popularly known as SETI, announced a new campaign to establish a global approach to intergalactic relations.
Based at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, their work includes impact assessments and coordination with world leaders to draw up treatises, as well as guidelines for “responsible” science communication in the social media era, according to a university press release.
“Science fiction is awash with explorations of the impact on human society following discovery of, and even encounters with, life or intelligence elsewhere,” said Dr. John Elliott, a computer scientist and coordinator of the school’s SETI Post-Detection Hub.
“But we need to go beyond thinking about the impact on humanity.”
For decades, experts and philosophers have pondered how our first conversation with extraterrestrial life will unfold, with the focus generally on how they will respond to us. But the Post-Detection Hub, hosted by the university’s centers for exoplanet science and global law and governance, warns that more thought should be paid to how we — as a human race — should appropriately respond to them.
The campaign comes as NASA’s Mars rover searches for signs of microscopic organisms, both living and fossilized. In August, the Perseverance rover successfully collected its first Martian rock sample after several failed attempts; whether the portion of regolith will make the journey to Earth has yet to be tested.
Per the Hub’s website: “The potential discovery of microbial life will likely raise different types of concern that would follow the discovery of intelligent life — we are as yet entirely unprepared as a species for the latter. The time is thus right for consideration of humanity’s response — and responsibility — following the detection of both life and intelligence in the Cosmos.”
Current “contact” protocols within the SETI community were first created in 1989 and revised in 2010, but experts have said they fall short of a complete and thorough global approach — particularly in terms of the ever-evolving social media landscape.
Some of the first conversations about the concept of social media in the wake of alien arrival transpired at the Royal Society’s 2010 Scientific Discussion Meeting on the matter. Perhaps fortuitously, news surrounding the event would come to spawn the fictitious title of “alien ambassador,” misattributed to the then-director of the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), Mazlan Othman.
Othman would go on to debunk the viral false media narrative — thus proving how quickly misinformation can spread online and why we need to create a plan before news of alien contact reaches the public.
The work of analyzing radio signals and decoding an alien language “is an elaborate and time-consuming process” which the Hub hopes to get ahead of, Elliott explained.
“Will we ever get a message from E.T.? We don’t know,” he continued. “We also don’t know when this is going to happen. But we do know that we cannot afford to be ill-prepared — scientifically, socially and politically rudderless — for an event that could turn into reality as early as tomorrow and which we cannot afford to mismanage.”