First Contact

I want to try a unique take on the concept, but it’s such an essential yet unexplored concept in Sci-Fi that unique takes on it are extremely hard, here’s what I’m looking for.

• Who find who? Does a humanity just discovering space travel encounter our cosmic brethren? Or do the aliens arrive to earth?
• Why has it taken so long for us to encounter other races?
• How xenophobic are the humans?

Ah, the Fermi Paradox. The most essential question of them all when it comes to interstellar travel.

The simplest and most likely answers are either A) they haven't found us yet (as far as we know, we are kind of in a remote part of our galaxy) or B) they have found us but are keeping their distance like a zoo or Prime Directive situation.

Edited by MajorTom on Aug 17th 2020 at 3:45:30 AM

Are you asking the question because you want us to write your story for you, or are you trying to start a broad conversation?

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 17th 2020 at 6:55:05 AM

I don’t know what to do with First Contact, I’m here for ideas.

If this story is going to be Like Reality, Unless Noted, there must be some explanation for why we haven't seen or encountered aliens yet. These are many, but I'll give a few:

1. It's really hard to get advanced enough to develop interstellar travel and/or communications. There's no FTL, space is really as big as we think it is. It's so difficult that only a handful of species ever accomplish it, making us pretty rare and/or special if we do.
   • Corollary: It's not that it's insurmountably hard, but that it takes a very long time, and we are among the first.
2. Most civilizations that get advanced enough to potentially travel the stars instead turn inwards and fashion their own solar systems into Dyson swarms and Jupiter brains and other stuff that we aren't likely to come into contact with unless we go there ourselves.
3. We're in an ancestor simulation, which is a completely different brain-buster — and also unfalsifiable, so not scientifically rigorous.
4. We're in a zoo run by a Type 3 or Type 4 civilization that's so monumentally powerful that it can completely hide its existence from us: define the reality we see through our telescopes and experiment with through our physics.

In situations 1 and 2, our most likely First Contact would come from communication, not from physical visitation. Physically, the greatest likelihood is that we'd encounter a long-range interstellar probe sent by a slightly more advanced civilization. These would be incredibly hard to detect, so we might not even know we'd been buzzed until the "hello" messages hit our radio antennas a hundred years or so later.

Alternatively, we could deploy our own interstellar probes, find a burgeoning post-industrial civilization around a nearby star, and try to send them messages. Such efforts would have a very limited maximum radius, partly because of the lifespan of the probes and partly due to the sheer time involved. A laser sail probe at 0.1 c would take 1000 years to reach a star 100 ly away, 100 more years to send a signal back, then it would be at least 100 years after that for any signal we could send to reach our neighbor. ^note That said, the probe signal itself could be a form of first contact given how powerful it would have to be.

There's also the problem of how to transmit such a signal. It would have to be millions of times stronger than any radio signal we can currently broadcast, likely involving Dyson swarm levels of power. Alternatively, we could attempt to occlude our sun in a regular pattern, allowing observation via optical telescopes. The first messages sent between the stars might be shadow puppet plays against a star's light. Regardless of the method, this would be a megaproject.

Physical visitation by living beings... would you send people on a thousand-year voyage to another star on the off chance there'd be a habitable planet with intelligent aliens? If you wouldn't, then neither would they.

If we're in situations 3 or 4, we are utterly helpless and our only hope is that our masters don't turn off the power or get bored and blow us all up.

Note that this doesn't cover Horde of Alien Locusts or Grey Goo scenarios in which our first contact is with terraforming agents sent to convert our planets into nice places for the Bugoids of Trappist Alpha to live.

Given all of the above, I'd say our likeliest first contact scenario is an automated probe, zipping through our solar system at a tenth the speed of light, emitting a massive burst of radio energy to phone home.

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 17th 2020 at 7:05:32 AM

I presume you are familiar with the examples listed on the Wikipedia page.

The answers to your questions depend on what kind of story you are writing—you have to tell us more. Are you writing space opera, cosmic horror, a technothriller, a comedy/parody, an action-adventure, a hard-science exploration, or what? World-building follows plot, not the other way around. Have you developed a rough outline of your story yet, any character ideas, a theme, anything at all?

The Dark Forest had an interesting theory about why nobody seems to be talking to us. An alien species on their way to wipe out humanity are very concerned humans will find out about the titular "Dark Forest Theory" which, to paraphrase, is as follows:

• Every civilization is prioritizing its own survival.
• There are finite resources in the universe.
• The time and distance between interstellar civilizations is so great, and the societies so different, that no two civilizations will ever fully be able to communicate with each other.
• As no civilization will be able to determine friend or foe, each will become paranoid that the others will be out to get them or their limited resources and strike first before the others can destroy them.
• The safest means of ensuring a civilization's survival is to avoid any attempts at interstellar communication, or give any indication that your solar system has means of interstellar travel.

The answers to your questions depend upon what type of story you want to write. Is it a space opera, cosmic horror, comedy/parody, a technothriller, hard science exploration, what exactly? What effect do you want to achieve? You hve to tell us more.

I presume that, if the story is set today, the aliens find us. What kept them so long? A few ideas off the top of my head:

• The aliens are busy fighting a war. We aren't important until we are advanced enough to make a contribution, for one side or the other.

• Our signals are too weak for the aliens to detect, and as for us, we don't know what to look for, and likely wouldn't recognize the signs if we saw them. Do stone age tribes understand radio?

• The aliens do not possess either written or spoken language, and do not recognize our attempts at communication. Maybe they communicate by shades of color, or internal radio.

• The aliens are so freaked out by us that they keep their distance. Perhaps they don't have predator-prey relationships on their planet. Maybe life on earth looks like incomprehensible monsters to them.

• The aliens do not meet our preconceived notions of what sapience is like, nor do we meet theirs...

If you set your story far enough into the future, we might have the technical capability to find them. In that case, the aliens are likely not to be developed enough to send signals (because it would be quite a coincidence to discover a species at more or less our own level of development, given how many billions of years life has been evolving on our planet).

As for how xenophobic we would be, that depends. I doubt appearance or form would matter very much—lots of people love dolphins, and even octopods. More important would be their behavior, and to what extent they represent a threat to us. Should they attack us, expect a genocide if they are less developed than we are; and a new religion of they are more advanced (what you cannot destroy, attempt to placate).

Hope that's helpful.

Edited by DeMarquis on Aug 17th 2020 at 11:08:03 AM

There's a world of difference between contacting an alien species and fighting them. The "Dark Forest" hypothesis presupposes that it will ever be feasible to wage war across interstellar distances. De Marquis is also correct that it would be extraordinarily improbable for two neighboring, intelligent civilizations to contemporaneously develop space travel and interstellar communications.

In any scenario where one civilization (I hesitate to say species because who knows if multi-species civilizations could exist?) wishes to wage war on another across light-years, they are probably going to have an overwhelming advantage. Think about the difference even fifty years makes on military technology on our planet, and that we're probably talking about a gap of thousands or even millions of years.

In a million years, an expansionist civilization could occupy most of the habitable worlds in a galaxy. Without FTL, it wouldn't remain a civilization for very long, but still. You must answer the question of where all these aliens are and why we haven't seen evidence of them, but in any practical sense we would be out-competed before we even left the starting gate.

So, we end up with a few likely scenarios.

• The super-advanced aliens are benevolent and want us to join their Federation. This could be a golden scenario as long as they don't decide to take away our free will or "fix" us or something. (c.f. Three Worlds Collide)
  • Story idea: We get impressed into this civilization, discover it's corrupt, then fight from the inside, co-opting its technology for our own use.
• The super-advanced aliens aren't interested in competition and want to wipe us out. Game over, we lose. Sorry, science-fiction writers.
  • Story idea: There's a galactic conflict going on and we get recruited by the good team to fight the evil team. (c.f. Startide Rising)
• We are one of the above.
  • Story idea: We move out into space and start conquering or befriending our neighbors, only to run into a galactic mega-civilization that isn't interested in competition.

The absolute least likely is that we meet as equals.

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 18th 2020 at 8:50:33 AM

Note that interstellar communication, hard as that would be, is loads easier than interstellar travel (least if your talking anything larger than a mini probe). If we managed to connect with an interstellar civilization (which means they went out of their way to communicate at our tech level) it wouldn't matter so much how advanced they are if faster than light travel is impractical or impossible. Distance is the great equalizer.

So we don't have to disable Arecibo just yet.

It’s usually played for comedy, but I honestly think the most reasonable answer to the Fermi Paradox is that everyone just knows that we suck. We’re xenophobic enough that we’ve had wars based on minor cosmetic differences between people, imagine how much we’d freak out about other species. We also have enough nuclear weapons to do irreparable damage to any planet earth-sized or smaller. It took us so long to find aliens because they are very intentionally avoiding us.

"Why have we never been contacted by intelligent life?"

"Because they are too intelligent!"

Well, war in this instance usually involves the side that detects intelligence life destroying the sun of whoever was broadcasting by hitting it with something going at lightspeed.

More on topic though, the book that proceeds the Dark Forest does have a more conventional First Contact scenario when China's version of SETI does make contact with our closest alien neighbors.

The alien manning the comm on the other side immediately tells the woman monitoring for responses to stop broadcasting, because he knows his people are looking for an inhabitable planet to colonize because their world is doomed. And they're prepared to wipe out any indigenous life and this particular alien has a conscience and doesn't want that.

Unfortunately for humanity, this particular woman lost her family in the Cultural Revolution and she now hates everyone for it. Aliens want to invade Earth and destroy humanity and they only need her to keep broadcasting to confirm their locations? SEND. SEND. SEND.

That's the plot of "Three Body Problem".

That is indeed the title. Neat, someone else read it.

I mean, sure, for a fictional premise to set up a thought experiment, this is fine, but in reality that's not a thing. For one, if it were possible at all, and any civilization developed it, and that civilization then used it, we would see evidence in the galaxy. A star "blowing up" due to some impact would leave evidence that could be seen for millions of light years.

Also, something moving at near light speed through space would leave a blazing trail of gamma rays from impacts with the interstellar medium. Also also, even if you threw Earth at our Sun at 0.99 c, it might just burp. I'm not sure how the physics work out, but the energy required to do that would... hold on, I need to do some math.

Okay, I'm back. If I'm doing this right, the Sun's gravitational binding energy is 2.28 x 10³⁸ J. While it also has internal energy pressure and is not solid, I'm going to ignore those for now and treat it as a solid body. You would only need to accelerate something with the mass of the Earth to about 0.03 c to achieve that level of kinetic energy. Only. Or you could accelerate something a little less than the mass of the asteroid Ceres to 0.99 c.

Our sun produces about 3.86 x 10²⁶ watts of power. You would need to collect a bit shy of 19,000 years of its total output to get enough kinetic energy to destroy it.

These hypothetical star-busting aliens either need sci-fi space magic or an insane level of dedication.

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 19th 2020 at 7:05:36 AM

I read it. What potentially save humanity is that the aliens don't have FTL. It will take them centuries to get here, and they are afraid we will have prepared ourselves by then. So they embark on a psy-op to undermine the integrity of human science.

I think the problem is that we don't have any idea of what the behaviour of an alien species might be. It's not a given they'll behave like humans (and the human response to finding a civilization on another planet won't be to blow it up, anyway). I am guessing, they'll display that thing known as "curiosity" because otherwise why bother looking for other civilizations, and they probably don't kill each other on sight because otherwise they wouldn't be around for long enough to FTL anything. But beyond these two attractors, it's all up in the air.

I think we can go a bit farther than that. To be capable of space travel of any sort, never mind interstellar travel, they must have a concept of science and technology and use something akin to the scientific method to explore and manipulate their world on large scales. They must understand mathematics, chemistry, and physics. They must have systems for long-distance communication and sharing of information. They must be capable of long-term planning across generations (or else be very long-lived).

If they search for alien life or try to communicate across interstellar distances, they must recognize that intelligent life can exist elsewhere and that it might be capable of communication. Meeting such life, they must assume that it will be very different from themselves and that they will have to learn how to communicate with it.

We can't be sure if they are looking for aliens to talk to them, mate with them, eat them, destroy them, or whatever, but they must at least conceptualize life in the universe other than themselves. We can work with that.

Some ideas for contacting aliens start with something as simple as broadcasting a Fibonacci sequence or a series of prime numbers: a mathematical set that cannot be reproduced by natural phenomena.

Edit: I am ignoring concepts like space whales and other "naturally spacefaring" species, as these are pure fiction as far as we know. I am also ignoring organic spaceships and psychic space travel and things like that for the same reason. If you want to make fiction with those in it, great, but that's outside the scope of what I'm talking about.

I'm also not talking about the discovery of indigenous, intelligent, non-spacefaring species, as these could indeed have a wide variety of biologies and psychologies.

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 21st 2020 at 9:06:10 AM

A slightly unconventional take I'm doing in one of my stories is this.

The short version is that humanity's first two contacts with alien life gave them a really negative impression about what to expect, but the third one completely upended their expectations in a hilariously awkward way.

The long version:

• Humanity's first contact was a Type V civilization who are basically a multiversal version of the Borg and with whom first contact is usually an extinction-level event, a fate humanity very narrowly averted and even got a bunch of Imported Alien Phlebotinum for their trouble. It later turns out that the same civilization was responsible for the Permian-Triassic mass extinction event.
• Humanity's second contact was with a kindred of Reality Warper Eldritch Abomination Physical Gods (ranging from Type 0 to Type 2 per individual) locked in a civil war, of whom one faction immediately tricked the other faction and humanity into going to town on each other, resulting in another near-run extinction-level event.
• Once that was sorted out, humanity started cautiously looking around space to see if there's anyone out there who aren't trying to kill them on sight and found the answer to the Fermi Paradox: we were never visited by aliens because all currently spacefaring races in the galaxy are roughly in the same neighborhood as humanity in terms of technological development, since all who advanced far enough to attract the attention of the aforementioned multiversal civilization ceased to exist in very short order, including multiple Precursor civilizations within at least the past 250 million years. Civilizations are few and far between, even less of whom are interstellar and even less of whom ever made contact with others. Space is virgin territory ripe for colonization, but the lack of a pre-existing galactic infrastructure for FTL travel and communication like in other fictional universes means the barrier of entry is insurmountable to the point where most races go extinct before they ever come close to pulling it off, with even the humans only pulling it off because it was Die or Fly for them.
  • In fact, the humans go into their proper first contact having reasonably assumed based on prior experience that they are the bottom of the food chain in the universe... only for the other species to take one look at them and assume humanity must be the local Benevolent Precursors (they have the same concept in their own pop culture), causing the humans to realize that they massively overestimated the weight class of the average civilization out there, having assumed that extinction-level threats are the norm rather than the exception and powerleveled a bit too far. As such, they have no idea how to handle another species looking to them for wisdom and benevolence, leading to much hilariously awkward prodding of each other and whispering "Um... you tell them." "Hell no, you tell them." as the aliens are wondering why their enlightened and advanced guests are hesitating.
• And if that isn't complicated enough, it eventually turns out that there's a Type VI species in the setting who have been aware of terrestrial life since literally the first prokaryotic lifeforms arose on Earth but are deliberately avoiding direct contact outside a single individual doing a Q impression.

Edited by amitakartok on Aug 25th 2020 at 4:36:48 PM

I want to read this story of yours sound pretty good

Another mildly unconventional idea I came up with over the years was a situation that looks like an Alien Invasion at first glance. What eventually turns out to be going on is that the big-ass alien vessel in lunar orbit where the attacks originate from is actually a Generation Ship dispatched centuries ago to colonize the planet. All their astronomers could tell was that this exoplanet was habitable, not that it was already inhabited by a native sentient species. So when the aliens arrive and find humanity, they assume we're squatters who moved in while they were on route - and since they had no alternative destination in mind in case Earth turned out to be a bust, they launched an intimidation campaign to get rid of the squatters with preferably minimal casualties.

And when that doesn't seem to be working, the aliens squint, take a closer look at human civilization and have a Mass "Oh, Crap!" moment upon realizing that we're too numerous and well-established for mere squatters, meaning that they've been trying to evict a native civilization without realizing. Which sends them into internal debate over what to do, as one faction insists that they should take the planet because their ancestors didn't put so much time, effort and resources into launching the ship for them to give up just because someone else got there first, while another faction insists that they're guests, not conquerors, and should behave as such by striving to coexist with their new neighbors.

The alien vessel in question is the original double-cylinder version of the O'Neill cylinder, which is a plot point: since resources are limited during an interstellar voyage at sublight speeds, the crew are completely gender-segregated into one cylinder each for population control purposes. It is physically impossible to pass between the two sections without EVA and the two halves of the population are forbidden from contacting each other beyond the males periodically sending DNA samples over to the female section for reproductive purposes and getting male newborns in return (female ones stay and are raised in the female section, obviously). And yes, the aliens do react like horny teens to the humans casually living mixed-gender because it's literally been centuries since any of them had ever seen someone of the opposite gender.

Would there be a gag of humans sending the equivalent of Playboy Magazine over to the males of that species?

No.

But the teenage mecha squad fighting back against the "invasion" are all-female with a tall and very buxom squad leader, eliciting predictable reactions from the male alien ambassadors when official first contact happens on the ground.

Edited by amitakartok on Aug 26th 2020 at 3:38:12 PM

You seem like an amazing story teller and I would love to read or rp in your world