Human civilization stands at a precipice as
we ask the question, are we alone?
But once we discover evidence of an alien
civilization, it’s going to be something
that would be very difficult to *undiscover*
in that it could have profound effects on
human cultures, and how we see our place in
the universe.
But such a discovery would not be unexpected,
indeed we’ve been searching in anticipation
of finding evidence of alien civilizations
for decades.
But when it happens, what will first contact
be like?
Science fiction has taken on this question
multiple times in movies like Contact, or
E.T..
But the reality of first contact, should it
ever happen may be very different than how
science fiction has generally depicted it.
So here are ten alien first contact scenarios.
Number 10.
Silent Aliens
All too often we tend to think that if we
found aliens they would want to talk to us.
There is in reality, no guarantee of this
however.
Alien civilizations may not hide their existence,
and can thusly be discovered through bio or
technosignatures, but they may not know of
our existence, at least until we send a dedicated
radio signal to them.
It’s also possible that they may have no
interest in interacting with us, deeming us
either too primitive or too distant to make
much difference to them.
Part of why the concept of alien civilizations
captivates us is because we haven’t ever
seen one, and our “are we alone?”
question remains unanswered.
But what happens if we do find them, what
might we think of the 47th alien civilization
civilization we find?
Would the 234th alien civilization in the
milky way even make the headlines?
As such, only the most interesting civilizations
found would be on everyone’s radar, and
we may not be interesting to anyone else.
So we may find ourselves in the position of
no contact at all, even though we’ve seen
evidence of an alien civilization.
As such, we are unlikely to ever know very
much about that silent civilization, especially
if the signal we pick up is something that
carries no decipherable information, such
as radar.
We may be able to work out details of their
home star system, or even their exoplanet
of origin, but as to what they were like as
a species and a civilization, we would know
very little until we physically visit their
star system.
When we do, what happens then?
Number 9.
The Undecipherable Message
One of the big ifs in SETI is if we did receive
an unambiguous contact signal from an alien
civilization, would ever be able to decipher
it.
There is no guarantee of this.
This gets into both technology and linguistics.
Humans that speak different languages still
have a lot of tools, such as hand gestures
or activities, to get a point across.
But what of huge interstellar distances and
no linguistic, biological, technological or
sociological connections whatsoever?
This has led scientists to think in terms
of communication using science.
The laws and behaviour of the universe itself
are basic commonalities we would have with
alien civilizations.
If they’re technologically advanced then
they have an understanding of science to have
gotten there, and as a result, they’re probably
also going to know what a pulsar is.
They will understand some form of mathematics,
and so on.
Within that may be the key to at least initial
communication.
But say they communicate in some way very
different from us?
Say they communicate chemically?
We may never have a reference to figure that
out.
Without the key to their form of communication,
we may never be able to figure out what they
even during a face to face first contact scenario.
And likewise, they would likely find us equally
incomprehensible.
Number 8.
Interstellar Semaphore
It was once said that a picture is worth a
thousand words.
That may be true for interstellar communication
as well.
The defining factor here is efficiency, sending
out radio signals of, say a human voice on
radio takes massive, massive amounts of energy
to do at any real distance.
Just to do it here on earth with a radio station,
you need to put thousands of watts into the
signal just to be heard outside of your own
city.
This led to ideas that contacting other civilizations
may not be done through radio at all, and
in which case SETI has barely looked at the
galaxy.
It might make more sense to simply block starlight
in an unnatural way that someone else might
see and realize that what they are seeing
is not possible in nature and must be artificially
produced.
This concept goes back to a scientist named
Luc Arnold who hypothesized in a paper, link
below, that an alien civilization might put
up unnaturally shaped objects, such as triangles,
squares, or even louvers.
These could be made of thin materials, such
as mylar, or might even double as habitats
and other useful megastructures for the alien
civilization, while having a dual use as a
means of telling someone else, so long as
their telescopes line up with the transits
of their megastructures, that they are not
alone.
Number 7.
Ghosts of Alien Civilizations
Civilizations do not last forever, at some
point, even if it’s the end of the universe,
it all comes to an end.
But how long do they last on average?
Is it thousands of years, millions, billions,
trillions?
This is an unknown, and it’s very dependent
on the social conditions of an alien civilization,
as it does with us.
If they have no reason to conduct warfare
on their world, or they make good decisions
as a rule, then perhaps they do last indefinitely.
Or, they may not.
It’s easy to envision that as technology
advances, new, very potent dangers like advanced
artificial intelligence, or superintelligence
present themselves and effectively destroy
everyone.
Perhaps our universe is one where artificial
intelligences war with each other, and biology
is left behind only as a vague memory.
But our own civilization has something that
is hit or miss in this regard.
When you read a book written by an ancient
person, whether it’s from the world of the
Greeks, the Romans, the records and poems
of the ancient Chinese, this represents a
telescoping of the ancient world into our
modern world of today.
The ancients speak to us through writing and
archeology.
Could this be the case with the Milky Way
Galaxy?
Is most contact between civilizations archeological
instead of active?
Well, maybe.
We have sent out artifacts of our civilization,
several probes including the pioneers and
the voyagers included plaques intended to
show anyone that might find them what we were
like when the probes were launched, much in
the same way that people in the present and
past created time capsules to tell people
of the future what their world was like.
Could this happen on a galactic scale?
Could the Milky Way be full of archeological
evidence and time capsules that answer the
question of are we alone?
Given the size of the solar system, if there
are time capsules here or artifacts, if they
aren’t enormous, we wouldn’t yet know
about them and likely will not for some time.
This is a true unknown still and we literally
have no looked for this yet.
Number Six.
They were Already Watching
We are relative newcomers to things like electricity
and the advancing technology dependent on
it, and we’re even newer to the Search for
Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or for that
matter radio.
Because of that, until the last hundred years,
it would actually have been very difficult
for an alien civilization to even know that
there was someone here to contact.
And, there’s also the possibility that we
still aren’t interesting enough to bother
with.
This could lead to a situation where they
simply establish first contact as soon as
we reach a certain level of development, or
at least become detectable to the aliens.
This ultimately means that not much further
than a hundred light years out, it’s not
yet possible for an alien civilization to
detect a technosignature from this world.
Within that distance, they might know we’re
here and have sent a contact message, but
there simply hasn’t been enough time for
their signal to reach us.
In truth, there could be all sorts of contact
signals heading our way.
But there’s another possibility.
Earth as an exoplanet has presented biosignatures
for much longer of a period of time.
The oxygen levels of this world along with
things like the vegetative red edge where
plants become highly reflective in the infrared
could have tipped off an alien civilization
that there is a biosphere here.
If they’ve been observing for a very long
time, they might know that our biosphere is
very ancient, and perhaps likely to produce
a civilization at some point.
Given that they might have had billions of
years to watch this world develop, that’s
plenty of time to send and station a contact
probe within our solar system, or as Dr. Avi
Loeb of Harvard advances, someone might create
a network strategically placed buoys to periodically
check out worlds like earth.
And, some day, should something like that
start transmitting to us, having the alien
transmitter nearby would help cut down communications
times.
Number 5.
DNA SETI.
It’s a disconcerting thought that it’s
possible, though doesn’t seem very likely,
that each and every one of us carries a purposely
placed communication from an alien civilization
within our own DNA.
If at some point in the past Earth was visited,
and that visiting civilization decided to
send a message to any future intelligences
that might arise, one way to do it is to encode
evidence of their visit into the DNA of all
life on earth.
This would not necessarily mean they intended
to guide evolution or interfere in anyway,
rather they simply might have intended to
use our own biology as a way to say hello.
Whether evidence of this exists is a matter
of debate, there have been claims, but they
are not accepted within the field of genetics.
But the concept is at least plausible.
Number 4.
Unknown Technologies.
One argument that can be made as to why, through
the efforts of SETI, we have not yet detected
an alien civilization is that we simply don’t
know what to look for.
There is no guarantee that radio waves or
laser emissions are how alien civilizations
communicate or establish contact with other
species.
If we were to go back only just a few centuries
ago, no one would have any idea that wireless
communication using electromagnetic waves
would be, in the future, the dominant form
of communications.
It was unfathomable to those people.
This may be the case for us as well, where
we simply have not yet imagined the technologies
that aliens might actually use.
If that’s the case, there could be contact
signals all around us that we do not yet recognize
as such, but may in the future, in which case
first contact will have been staring us in
the face the entire time.
Number 3.
Printable Aliens
One of the biggest problems with any first
contact scenario is how to do it meaningfully.
Any dialogue, assuming a dialogue can be established
at all, over very long distances will take
time.
A long time, to the point that a simple signal
saying hello could take hundreds or thousands
of years for a response.
But there is another option, if technologies
we think may be plausible have been developed
by alien civilizations.
One example of this would be a civilization
that has mastered its own genetics and commands
biology and technology to such an extent that
they might be able to send out a probe to
an inhabited exoplanet, study it from closeby,
and then when enough information is gathered
it either prints out a member of the alien
species for contact, or some kind of variant,
or even a custom being suited best for the
specifics of the first contact.
Or, if that’s not realistically possible,
it could simply make a machine suited for
the task and direct face to face first contact
occurs by proxy through a robot.
Number 2.
Attempt No Contact
One could say that actual contact with an
alien civilization is different to a detection,
in that a detection would merely constitute
spotting the activities of an exocivilization,
rather than actually communicating with them.
But there is one possibility that would be
a first contact of sorts, or at least a message
and that would be a warning to attempt no
contact at all.
This could take a number of different forms
and could be for a variety of reasons.
Exocivilizations may have in the past concluded
that any contact with others always presents
unnecessary risk.
Or we may simply spot a conflict in space
between two other civilizations that lead
us to conclude that we shouldn’t attempt
contact with either side in order to retain
cosmic neutrality.
Other options include stars whose composition
has been altered to reflect that the civilization
that altered the star possesses highly advanced
nuclear physics that could be used to create
advanced weaponry.
Or even the detection of a weapon directly,
perhaps in the form of a nicoll-Dyson sphere
that could direct the collective energy of
a star towards a region of a galaxy and effectively
destroy anything that’s there, though if
that were going on in the Milky Way, we’d
likely have spotted it by now..
Number One.
Circumventing the Speed of Light
In most scenarios, two way communication across
great distances in the Milky Way takes too
long at the speed of light for a meaningful
two-way conversation to take place, at least
in a reasonable amount of time.
And, as of yet, no one has thought of a solid
way to circumvent this problem.
It seems as though the universe has a built
in prohibition on faster than light meaningful
information transfer, including communication.
While there are speculative loopholes out
there that might allow faster than light travel
and communications, each suffers from significant
problems.
So it seems, at least right now, that faster
than light communications might never be within
our grasp.
But, there may be another way.
Change the rate at which we perceive time.
It may be possible in the far future through
technology to change this equation.
If your civilization collectively perceives
100,000 years as, say, one year, then apparent
rapid communications become possible throughout
the galaxy without violating the laws of physics.
Other civilizations may do likewise in order
to circumvent the speed of light limit through
manipulating the perception of time.
This alone might be a solution to the Fermi
Paradox in that alien civilizations run so
slowly, and communicate so slowly, that we
haven’t been looking long enough to notice
evidence of them, even if they are everywhere.
Thanks for listening!
I am futurist and science fiction author John
Michael Godier currently coining the phrase
near-asteroid earths.
If you think about it, we show a bias with
near-earth asteroids as we worry about them
striking us.
But what of the asteroids?
Look, Earth is no angel, and has eaten many
thousands of asteroids in the past.
If you’re an asteroid in the right orbit,
this planet represents one huge threat and
on that note check out my books at your favorite
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for regular, in-depth explorations into the
interesting, weird and unknown aspects of
this amazing universe in which we live.
