Every so often the news will cover a story about UFOs. There is generally little to these stories, but sometimes there’s enough to fuel speculation amongst the devout that perhaps our world has been visited by beings from another.
Speculation about alien life is certainly not a new phenomenon. It’s also not strictly the realm of the paranoid or conspiracy-minded. It’s perfectly sound science to question the potential for life on other worlds. After all, there is life on our world. That’s the best evidence we have that life could exist on a different planet. It happened once already.
There are almost no serious, scientific bodies in the world today that devote any considerable time to question what would happen if we ever discover alien life. There’s not a lot of money to be made in that industry or insight to be gained from mere speculation. But we are searching for alien life, and people are spending a lot of money trying to discover it. It just seems that we have little in the way of plans for dealing with it if we ever do find it.
Surveys suggest that most people believe that if alien life was discovered, or already has been discovered, we’d never know about it. The government would keep it under wraps. Only 19% of people believe that the government would tell us if the discovery was made.
But speculating about alien life is fairly passive, and also passe. Let’s suppose we do find alien life. What happens then? Surely, after this much speculation, we must have come up with a plan for how to handle it, right? Let’s find out.
Breaking the News
Let’s start by addressing a previous point. The government would not be able to cover up the existence of aliens if we discovered them via a signal from outer space. Could they cover up a crashed spaceship? Maybe. But signals from space would be picked up independently by non-government organizations all across the planet. It would be impossible to keep it under wraps once it was confirmed. So that’s one less conspiracy to worry about.
Informing the world that we’ve hooked up with aliens is a more complicated task than it sounds at first. After all, who is informing the world? That depends heavily on who has the information to begin with.
Researchers at SETI are monitoring space for signals all the time. They routinely discover them, but most are quickly discounted as being normal interference or background noise that exists in the universe. The few that cannot be so easily dismissed have to be further scrutinized. According to their procedures, if something were to pass their tests and be confirmed as coming from an alien intelligence, then the next step is to inform the public. They would issue a press release. They would also inform the scientific community at large and the Secretary General of the UN.
Government Plans
There are 195 countries in the world and you may be shocked to learn that, as far as one can learn on the internet, the vast majority do not have any publicly available plans for dealing with the unexpected arrival of extraterrestrials. If most countries do have these plans already drawn up, they’re keeping them under wraps.
As we mentioned, SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, has a protocol for what should be done if we ever receive a signal from an alien intelligence But SETI is not a government organization and the protocol is just what they think would be best, not any kind of binding agreement.
In 1977, the Prime Minister of Grenada brought up the idea of officially investigating UFO phenomena. No one took the bait, and he was later ousted from his office, anyway. Since that time the UN has paid no attention to the idea of UFOs or aliens and there is no international code or plan for dealing with alien life if we ever discover it.
The Outer Space Treaty was signed in 1967 and covers how humans will act in space with one another and that’s it. It was the first of five major space treaties that were signed by major world governments and all of them deal with human law in space.
The UN Director for Outer Space Affairs in 2010 confirmed that it was not her job to deal with aliens if they ever showed up on Earth. In fact, she had no idea what her job would be if they did arrive and the committee had never discussed the topic.
Because no aliens have ever come here, it seems like no one has bothered to come up with laws for what to do about it. The intent of the aliens would play a major role in how we handle them, of course. There’s a big difference between aliens crashing by accident, aliens coming to greet us, and aliens waging war. But we have plans for none of it. Given our active search for them, this is an ironic and perplexing conclusion to come to.
Many people treat the idea of preparing for potential contact with aliens as a joke. It’s not considered serious science. From that, you could infer that all of our efforts to discover alien life are done with the pre-established conclusion that they will fail.
NASA has plans in place for planetary protection but these are very much related to the potential of non sentient life. These are the sorts of policies that would protect us from bacteria from another world, that sort of thing. Much of it deals with sterile spacecraft and the safe handling of samples from other planets.
In terms of world governments, very few countries put any effort into searching space for signals from beyond. Even countries that used to, like Russia and Italy, have mostly given up on it. These days it’s almost strictly an American endeavor.
In 2022, we were still struggling with the idea of what to do if we made contact. Many researchers and scientists have come together on projects to offer their opinions and their advice but, again, none of this is set in stone. Maybe it will become a reality, should we ever discover alien life. But until then, who can say what we’ll do?
What would the effect be on society as a whole? How does this change your understanding of your religion and your beliefs? Do we respond to the message, and if so how? The consequences could be far-reaching.
One thing to keep in mind is that receiving a message from aliens is a far more peaceful kind of first contact than if they show up unannounced. If they show up unannounced, it means they have technology that is so far beyond our own it would defy the rules of physics as we understand them. And if they can master that kind of technology, then coming to visit is a lot like us going to visit animals in the zoo.
Problems with Alien Contact
It has been said that any sufficiently advanced alien civilization would be indistinguishable from God. That’s a pretty terrifying thing for a scientist to say. The idea of us making contact with an advanced race has been likened to Columbus discovering the native population when he crossed the ocean. But even that is a gross minimization of the technological disparity between the two sides.
Imagine we did get a signal, could we hope to understand it? We might not even understand it as a language when you consider how poorly we have done at understanding languages that came from our own world. How long would it have taken linguists to understand hieroglyphs without the Rosetta Stone?
The Fermi Paradox basically asks, if aliens are out there, why haven’t we encountered them yet? We should have come across something. Of the several proposed solutions to the Fermi Paradox, the most concerning one is that aliens do exist, but they have intentionally kept themselves hidden. Perhaps because they know something, being older and more advanced, that we do not.
Another solution to the paradox is that, because older stars and planets would have older civilizations, they may have already transcended biological life and artificial intelligence is what dominates space. It might not have any use for biologicals like us.
Though there is limited data on the subject, what research has been conducted indicates we cannot count on a unified response from humanity if aliens were contacted. Some groups have indicated an inclination to presume malevolent intent from any aliens we encounter while others would be more open to benevolent contact.
This disparity changes across cultures and religious backgrounds with more highly religious people less inclined to believe in alien benevolence. Those who already think our world is a bad place are more likely to believe aliens will be hostile, too. This could shape the human response.
That said, other research has shown that, in general, the analysis of available data shows human reaction would lean more towards positive than negative. Arguably this would change if we have evidence of an invading armada but that’s neither here nor there.
There is a fear on an international level regarding how a response to an alien signal might be handled. If we detect a signal and mankind doesn’t know how or if to respond, will the leader of one nation feel pressure to make a decision as quickly as possible to prevent the leader from another nation, maybe a rival, from responding first? And if they feel pressured to act, what happens if they act on incorrect information in their haste?
Physicist Stephen Hawking once warned against contacting alien life. He made the comparison to Columbus and suggested we’d better serve humanity by trying to avoid aliens, not find them.
Other scientists have pointed out that, historically, when humans discover a new place and new life, many of the dominant life forms in that area are killed off. Dire wolves, mastodons, giant moa, and more were all hunted to extinction. That also doesn’t account for pathogens brought to the less advanced area.
NASA-affiliated scientists tried to imagine what potential outcomes of alien contact would be for mankind in three scenarios – beneficial, neutral, and harmful. All theoretical, the work was an attempt to envision numerous possible scenarios. So beneficial could have been aliens sharing technology or solving advanced problems for us. Neutral could have been an inability for us to communicate or understand one another. But negative could range from them trying to take over our world, conducting experiments that destroy our region of space, bringing deadly pathogens, and more. One scenario was that aliens, seeing how destructive we have been on our own world, might just destroy us to protect other worlds. The conclusion was that perhaps we should be more cautious about blindly sending messages into the cosmos.
Critics of the anti-contact speculation point out that it’s all just that – speculation. But it’s worth remembering that there were once nine species of humans on Earth and then, after homo sapiens arrived, the others all died off.
SETI has warned that there are dangers in holding onto human-centric ideals and preconceived notions of what is and isn’t possible or likely, up to and including how aliens could travel to reach us, how long they might live, or how their minds might work. There is no reason to expect anything we could ever imagine to even be remotely true, we simply have no true basis for comparison.
Why We Want to Find Life
Given the potential negatives, one might wonder why we search for alien life at all. The answer is both simple and also as complex as any question we have ever asked. Life beyond our world can help us understand life as an entire concept. Where we came from, why we’re here, and, for some, the nature of God. Knowing the size of the universe as we do, to discover we are not alone cannot help but change our place in it, for better or worse.
For others, the search for life is the search for our own lives. Our own growth and understanding. Exploration is a key to survival as those who don’t explore tend to stagnate.
For less philosophical reasons, finding life in the universe could help us live better in our own world. We could find solutions to Earth’s problems related to disease and climate and more. All we can do is try, and maybe one day it will pay off. Unless something terrible happens.