Extraterrestrial First Contact: A World-Wide Jolt to the System

The Coronavirus named COVID-19 can provide great insight into how crisis is managed at the international level. It began as an illness in one particular Chinese city, Wuhan, and within weeks posed a threat to the stability of the world economy. It shows how nations are very much tied together these days. The Chinese response of shutting down factories and product distribution networks to prevent further spread of the disease soon became a concern internationally. And we are connected by more than just economic factors. Recently Paul Stares with the Council on Foreign Relations took a look at international crisis: “The world’s primary operating systems are now so tightly coupled that even relatively minor disruptions or shocks from geopolitical events are likely to reverberate widely and rapidly.”

Extraterrestrial First Contact could be a major geopolitical event for humanity. It depends on how big a threat it is to our security and how disruptive it is to our way of thinking. I believe that the proximity of aliens to Earth and the amount of information available from those aliens would be the two most important considerations in determining the level of crisis in a First Contact event. If the aliens are communicating to us from light-years away, the threat is relatively insignificant. However, if aliens have a spacecraft orbiting Earth, the level of threat would be quite high. I call that Direct First Contact.

The problem with responding to crisis in a Direct First Contact situation would not be getting people to pay attention- that would happen quite rapidly. The challenge would be how to get people to look beyond the obvious threat and examine the possible repercussions from First Contact. If aliens present themselves to us with good intentions, I believe that these repercussions could be much more dangerous than the alien threat. Those actions could include misinformation leading to fear; nations and corporations fighting for access to extraterrestrial information and insight; power grabs by politicians; and extremist violence.

This 2009 warning by the Council on Foreign Relations was a response to more earthly matters, but one could see how it could apply to extraterrestrial First Contact:

“Getting policymakers to commit resources proactively to address a hypothetical problem when there are demon­strably real ones in need of attention is difficult. Even when there are convincing signs of an emerging crisis, harried policymakers are still inclined to focus on man­aging the problem on their desks rather than the one still buried in their in-boxes. By the time the danger signals are unavoidable, the opportunities for early preventive action may have passed or the remaining options may seem either ineffective or too risky, further compounding the political inertia.”

What resources should policymakers commit in response to Direct First Contact? The most important could be a network to disseminate factual information while also dispelling misinformation. Direct First Contact would create quite a bit of fear and fear in the age of the Internet means fast-moving rumors. Governments would need to work together to establish a system to keep the public informed and calmed. That is not likely to top the agenda of worried national leaders in the wake of a Direct First Contact event. And it goes further than just public information: an entire network would have to be established to handle the needs of First Contact, beyond obvious military concerns. We would have to decide how the relationship between humans and aliens should proceed. We would need to determine how information would flow from aliens to humans, and if human gatekeepers were needed to prevent chaos in our institutions because of that information.

The problem is that none of this infrastructure exists. It would have to be built from the ground up and it would have to be constructed quickly. Humans can be incredibly responsive in times of crisis. The big question is whether the fear and awe that would be an inherent part of a Direct First Contact situation would so distract us that we would descend into chaos before we could establish a framework for response. Making use of current institutions, such as the United Nations, would be critical. But perhaps the most important part of the response would be calm world leaders working together across international boundaries to do what is best for the human race in the short term, and for future generations.

Photo by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash