Slice of PIE: What Do We Do When We Find “Them”?

Using the Program Guide of the 2018 WorldScience Fiction Convention in San Jose, CA, I read the notes and comments onthe subject. The link to the original post is below. (I originally posted thison July 21, 2019)

SETI: What Do We Do When We Find Them?
Scientists at SETI, and METI, and other organizations are actively searchingfor extraterrestrial intelligence. But what are we going to do when we makethat 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 ofthe Vatican Observatory
SB Divya: author, Nebula Award finalist, co-editor of Escape Pod, degree inComputational Neuroscience and Signal Processing, electrical engineer
Douglas Vakoch: PhD, President Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence, editor
Lonny Brooks: PhD, associate professor of communication at California StateUniversity

What to do, what to do?

I’m sure the “answer” was easy for this group and the people sitting in theroom. I wasn’t there, though I would have slipped unnoticed and unremarked intothe “people sitting in the room” demographic. ALL of us would haveintelligently discussed the pros and…well, pros.

I’m sure someone would have mentioned Hawking and Brin, and even though he waslisted among the Program Participants, he didn’t attend this particular sessionbecause his thoughts on phoning ET are pretty well known (though side-steppedhere 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 advancedcivilizations encountered less advanced ones... or indeed, when the same thinghappens 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 documentaryStephen Hawking’s Favorite Places, “Such advanced aliens would perhaps becomenomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they could reach,” hesaid. ‘Who knows what the limits would be?’ And in the, Hawking reiterated hisviews: ‘Meeting an advanced civilization could be like Native Americansencountering Columbus. That didn’t turn out so well.’”!

These and other ET “deniers” couldn’t have been “shushed” (both of them carrythe status of Super Star, and who would stand against Hawking, whose mind isoften compared to Einstein, Newton, and ), but I’m sure their imprecationswould have fallen on mostly deaf ears. Certainly a reasonable number of SFwriters have a somewhat different view of what interactions between Earth andextraterrestrials would be like. Even in Brin’s UPLIFT UNIVERSE, Humans, whileunderdogs, were hardly slaughtered wholesale and enslaved (though severalintelligences, 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 (seven billion tobe more accurate), and don’t really give much thought to the possibility ofFirst Contact. Yet, they would be the most profoundly affected by such anevent. HG Wells held out little hope for a calm response to First Contact:

“So you understand the roaring wave of fear that swept through the greatestcity in the world just as Monday was dawning—the stream of flight risingswiftly to a torrent, lashing in a foaming tumult round the railway stations,banked up into a horrible struggle about the shipping in the Thames, andhurrying by every available channel northward and eastward. By ten o’clock thepolice organisation, and by midday even the railway organisations, were losingcoherency, losing shape and efficiency, guttering, softening, running at lastin that swift liquefaction of the social body.” (XVI. THE EXODUS FROM LONDON. Paragraph1)

 

With wildly differing opinions amongthe faithful, what do you expect from commoners for whom the appearance ofreal-live aliens could range from outright, psychologically TRUE denial, toblithering panic, to catatonia.

While I’m sure the session was great fun, I’m pretty sure that theywouldn’t have any idea what a regular person’s real reaction to “when we findthem” would be…

Resource: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/36/36-h/36-h.htm#chap14,

http://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/shouldsetitransmit.html, https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/03/stephen-hawking-controversial-physics-black-holes-bets-science/, https://artscolumbia.org/literary-arts/prose/war-worlds-tell-us-human-nature-25393/
Program Book: https://www.worldcon76.org/images/publications/WC76_PocketProgram_2018_Final_WEB08152018.pdf
Image:  https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTyz5mfCZ4KlJUS-L_AF3evIqFEC0HTzIrhGg&usqp=CAU