It has been imagined many times. Astronomers use their telescopes to look for something that makes them cringe. There is a weak but persistent signal from an advanced civilization.
The world's nations are prepared for a major event like this. Is that the case? When Covid hit, the mess we made was obvious. If we were headless chickens, we would be like that. We can't afford to be rudderless and ill-prepared for an event that could happen at any time.
The creation of the Seti post-detection hub was underpinned by this assessment of Earth's unreadiness for contact with life elsewhere.
A core team of international researchers and affiliates will be brought together over the next few weeks. They will work out every aspect of how we should respond and analyse mysterious signals to get ready.
The focus has been on the search for signals but there has been a need to know what will happen with it. What are you going to do next? Strategies and scenarios are needed to understand what we need to do and how to do it. The Scouts motto is be prepared.
In the past 30 years, there have been advances in the search for E.T. Astronomers have found more than 5,000 worlds beyond the solar system since 1992. Most of the 300 billion stars in the Milky Way are home to their own families of planets. People who don't think there's life out there are riding against the tide of scientific opinion.
There is more to the story than the abundance of planets and the suspicion that some of them are suitable for life. Substantially more powerful telescopes are giving time to the search and will open great swathes of the sky to astronomy.
Seti researchers have some guidelines on how to act if they find a message from an advanced civilisation. A 2010 declaration from the International Academy of Astronautics encourages those who detect mysterious signals to rule out non-alien sources first. The public should be informed if there is consensus that the signal is legit.
There isn't a lot of guidance on what to do. The message needs to be studied. Is it a good idea to release it in full before it's deciphered? Is it possible that governments would let that happen? Is it appropriate for humankind to respond? Who decides what we return?
We would be looking at societal impact, information dissemination, the media, the impact on religions and belief systems, and much more after the initial announcement.
The expertise needed to manage first contact is fragmented and individual scientists and organizations have looked at it. He says that the Hub will bring together the necessary brains to come up with a plan.
The UN is perhaps the only global body with the clout to coordinate Earth's handling of a message. It might be necessary to have conversations over generations due to the distances between stars. The time it took for the message to reach us is assumed to have not gone extinct.
When we can't communicate with our own planet, are we really going to talk to aliens? If advanced civilisations start any message with a language guide, that would be a good thing. Even if a signal is undecipherable, researchers can get information about the sender's intelligence from the complexity of its structure.
Some people don't like the idea of a reply being sent. When Christopher Columbus encountered the Native Americans, he didn't turn out so well, according to Stephen Hawking.
Kaku said reaching out to aliens would be the biggest mistake in human history.
The man is more positive. He doesn't think it would be a good idea for advanced civilisations to keep themselves to themselves. He says there is an opportunity to link up if there is another intelligence out there. I don't believe we should miss it if we have the chance.
The new hub at St Andrew's is an important step in raising awareness of how ill-prepared we currently are, according to Lewis Dartnell, an astronomer and professor of science communication at the University of Westminster.
He said that communication time would be on the scale of many centuries if aliens were intelligent. Even if we received a signal tomorrow, we would have plenty of time to assemble an international team of experts and consider how the Earth should respond.
To prevent capable individuals or private corporations from responding independently, before a consensus has formed on whether it is safe to respond at all, and what we would want to say as one planet, is the bigger concern.
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