Scientists at SETI, and METI, and other organizations are actively searching for extraterrestrial intelligence. But what are we going to do when we make that first contact?
Andrew Fraknoi: Director of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, author, Asteroid 4859 Asteroid Fraknoi…
Brother Guy J. Consolmagno, SJ: American research astronomer and Director of the Vatican Observatory
SB Divya: author, Nebula Award finalist, co-editor of Escape Pod, degree in Computational Neuroscience and Signal Processing, electrical engineer
Douglas Vakoch: PhD, President Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence, editor
Lonny Brooks: PhD, associate professor of communication at California State University
EVERYTHING THAT FOLLOWS IS MY PERSONAL OPINION
What to do, what to do?
I’m sure the “answer” was easy for this group and the people sitting in the room. I wasn’t there, though I would have slipped unnoticed and unremarked into the “people sitting in the room” demographic. ALL of us would have intelligently discussed the pros and…well, pros.
I’m sure someone would have mentioned Hawking. Probably David Brin as he was listed among the Program Participants, he didn’t attend this particular session because his thoughts on phoning ET are pretty well known (though side-stepped here by quoting the originator of the opinion he echoes at every opportunity): “Jared Diamond offers an essay on the risks of attempting to contact ETIs, based on the history of what happened on Earth whenever more advanced civilizations encountered less advanced ones... or indeed, when the same thing happens during contact between species that evolved in differing ecosystems. The results are often not good: in inter-human relations slavery, colonialism, etc. Among contacting species: extinction.”!
From the grave, Hawking’s opinion would have echoed from the 2016 documentary Stephen Hawking’s Favorite Places, “Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they could reach,” he said. ‘Who knows what the limits would be?’ And in the, Hawking reiterated his views: ‘Meeting an advanced civilization could be like Native Americans encountering Columbus. That didn’t turn out so well.’”!
These and other ET “deniers” couldn’t have been “shushed” (both of them carry the status of Super Star, David Brin for his amazing body of published work, and who would stand against Hawking -- whose mind is often compared to Einstein's and Newton's?), but I’m sure their imprecations would have fallen on mostly deaf ears. Certainly a reasonable number of SF writers have a somewhat different view of what interactions between Earth and extraterrestrials would be like. Even in Brin’s UPLIFT UNIVERSE, Humans, while underdogs, were hardly slaughtered wholesale and enslaved (though several intelligences, like the Gubru and the Soro, thought Humanity could use a bit of “finishing” followed by a thousand years of indenture).
No, rather than the faithful and the deniers, the Con should have invited the “person on the street”, the ones who number in the BILLIONS (eight billion recently, to be more accurate), and don’t really give much thought to the possibility of First Contact. Yet, they would be the most profoundly affected by such an event. HG Wells held out little hope for a calm response to First Contact:
With wildly differing opinions among the faithful, what do you expect from commoners for whom the appearance of real-live aliens could range from outright, psychologically TRUE denial, to blithering panic, to catatonia?
While I’m sure the session was great fun, I’m pretty sure that they wouldn’t have any idea what a regular person’s real reaction to “when we find them” would be. HG Wells, the parent of the English-speaking world's "alien invasion" genre didn't seem to hold much hope for London's common folk:
I’m sure someone would have mentioned Hawking. Probably David Brin as he was listed among the Program Participants, he didn’t attend this particular session because his thoughts on phoning ET are pretty well known (though side-stepped here by quoting the originator of the opinion he echoes at every opportunity): “Jared Diamond offers an essay on the risks of attempting to contact ETIs, based on the history of what happened on Earth whenever more advanced civilizations encountered less advanced ones... or indeed, when the same thing happens during contact between species that evolved in differing ecosystems. The results are often not good: in inter-human relations slavery, colonialism, etc. Among contacting species: extinction.”!
From the grave, Hawking’s opinion would have echoed from the 2016 documentary Stephen Hawking’s Favorite Places, “Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they could reach,” he said. ‘Who knows what the limits would be?’ And in the, Hawking reiterated his views: ‘Meeting an advanced civilization could be like Native Americans encountering Columbus. That didn’t turn out so well.’”!
These and other ET “deniers” couldn’t have been “shushed” (both of them carry the status of Super Star, David Brin for his amazing body of published work, and who would stand against Hawking -- whose mind is often compared to Einstein's and Newton's?), but I’m sure their imprecations would have fallen on mostly deaf ears. Certainly a reasonable number of SF writers have a somewhat different view of what interactions between Earth and extraterrestrials would be like. Even in Brin’s UPLIFT UNIVERSE, Humans, while underdogs, were hardly slaughtered wholesale and enslaved (though several intelligences, like the Gubru and the Soro, thought Humanity could use a bit of “finishing” followed by a thousand years of indenture).
No, rather than the faithful and the deniers, the Con should have invited the “person on the street”, the ones who number in the BILLIONS (eight billion recently, to be more accurate), and don’t really give much thought to the possibility of First Contact. Yet, they would be the most profoundly affected by such an event. HG Wells held out little hope for a calm response to First Contact:
With wildly differing opinions among the faithful, what do you expect from commoners for whom the appearance of real-live aliens could range from outright, psychologically TRUE denial, to blithering panic, to catatonia?
While I’m sure the session was great fun, I’m pretty sure that they wouldn’t have any idea what a regular person’s real reaction to “when we find them” would be. HG Wells, the parent of the English-speaking world's "alien invasion" genre didn't seem to hold much hope for London's common folk:
CHAPTER 16
THE EXODUS FROM LONDON
"So you understand the roaring wave of fear that swept through the greatest city in the world just as Monday was dawning—the stream of flight rising swiftly to a torrent, lashing in a foaming tumult round the railway stations, banked up into a horrible struggle about the shipping in the Thames, and hurrying by every available channel northward and eastward. By ten o’clock the police organisation, and by midday even the railway organisations, were losing coherency, losing shape and efficiency, guttering, softening, running at last in that swift liquefaction of the social body."
As a speculative fiction writer of the Science Fiction variety, I know exactly how I would WANT to react. But as a Human who struggles with change of routine sometimes, I must sheepishly confess that I wouldn't be a likely candidate for a First Contact team. In the 1957 movie made from Well's book, the First Contact team is disintegrated by the Martians, becoming atom-blasted shadows and piles of dust on the ground (the shadows based on the discoveries made in Hiroshima after the US dropped The Bomb on that city and Nagasaki)
Also, invasion and First Contact are rather different. I doubt that FC would ever come to me. Invasion would just happen. They might invade New York or London, or even Beijing; and the changing of the governance of Earth might have no affect on me at all here in Minnesota (being a fly-over state). Wells' assumption was that the war Humans feared would be exactly like the war an alien would wage -- no different in tactics, just "more horrible weapons", though fundamentally the same as the weapons that existed at the time.
How would the "person-on-the-street" react to either invasion or First Contact?
We had forgotten, in these initial decades of the 21st Century what an event of global impact was like. Of course the COVID-19 pandemic changed all of that. We had a disease that while it wasn't instantly deadly, whittled away at the global population with results ranging from negligible to catastrophic. We discovered a Human reaction that ranged from denial to panic; governments whose response ranged from apathetic to draconian.
It's my personal opinion that were Earth to be "contacted", THIS would have been our response. Invasion of course, is different. We might fight as a united world...or there might be no chance with a rain of asteroids dropped on us -- to get an idea of what THAT even might be like, see if you can find the old made-for-TV movie, "Without Warning" starring (among others), TV broadcast journalist, Sander Vanocur...
3 comments:
What do we do when we find them? If our species' past is any indicator, we find out whether they taste more like beef, chicken, or pork.
Unless they packaged it as "nuggets" or advertised on ARBY'S ("We've got the meats!") most people wouldn't care -- unless maybe we sold it at the Minnesota State Fair...hmmm...a couple years ago I look a picture of a painting at the MNState Fair...an abandoned carnival, mountains in the background, and in front a "crashed spaceship". I'd always wanted to write a story with that as the inspiration...what if some of the New Food was alien meat; and...um...and...something, something, something...
There are no end of horror movies that begin with that premise, or it's reverse. How long ago was it that Damon Knight wrote, "IT'S A COOKBOOK!"
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