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so today we are continuing our look at aliencivilizations by discussing the concept of first contact with an alien civilization.this is much too broad a topic for just one episode so we will be saving some conceptslike language for future episodes. we will also be placing an emphasis today on a lotof the misconceptions of this idea from science fiction, continuing last week’s theme ofstupid aliens. how such a first contact scenario goes downwill depend a lot on their own psychology but we can’t know too much about that, justhow certain qualities of the contact will impact logical actions. there are nine waysi could think of in which we might encounter aliens, in general terms, and here they are:1. we’ve already met them

they’ve been here before in the distantpast, or are here now observing us or tinkering with our civilization.2. we find their ruins we encounter an extinct species and are siftingthrough their ruins, contact is one way, us seeing them before they died.3. we see signs of them from a distance life, especially intelligent life, tends toleave a lot of telltales signs it exists. here there’s no overt contact either way,but this is still contact and it’s probably the most likely form.4. we encounter them in deep space this highly improbable scenario is popularin scifi. this is our first example where live two-way communication is possible, andprobably the scenario most likely to result

in violence, as the captain will be wonderingwhy the ship is quietly approaching one of your planets.5. we hear them by radio we hear them or they hear us, and we haveplenty of time to decipher the message and reply if we choose to.6. by instant but distant communication unlike the former, if we assume some sortof faster-than-light, or ftl, means of communication, this is our second form that allows real-timecommunication, but doesn’t appear to include danger or urgency, at least not at first glance.7. we come to them here we find some species who either doesnot yet have spaceflight or just doesn’t much use it, which makes a big difference.once more real-time communication is possible.

8. we meet them through a third partyprobably one of the first questions you’d ask another alien civilization is if theyknow of anyone else, the answer could easily be yes and you would want the details aboutthem, but would need to be worried about skewed perceptions or even outright lies.9. they come to us our last one, though probably the most commonin fiction, is that an alien ship comes to us and makes contact, peaceful or not. i tendto like to save this for last when discussing this topic because so many of our misconceptionsin regard to it come from not determining reasonable behavior in advance.now before we jump into these we will make a few assumptions. we can’t be sure aboutany of these but they are all ones that ought

to be true of nearly anyone we should encounterand odds are that any exceptions will be few and far between and we’d have met some othercritters first who do follow our assumptions in order to get some practice doing it rightbefore meeting oddballs. so what do we know? a given alien civilizationwas either designed by nature or by some intelligence, if the former they will be inclined towardsurvival and pretty good at it, evolution works on survival of the fittest and isn’tgentle with those who are neither fit nor interested in survival. if the latter, peoplemade by someone else, it would seem likely they’d include self-preservation as a desiretoo. if we created an artificial intelligence thatwas designed to operate on some task autonomously,

so that we weren’t present, we would includesome self-preservation motivation. this might vary from minimal self-preservation to extreme.a robot that will cheerfully perform a suicidal task to one which would not even take a 1%chance of injury to save millions, but it will have something designed to preserve it.this could include organic lifeforms too, like a species created or modified heavilyaway from their natural form. now i don’t include that self-preservationor autonomy on my toaster, but that’s because it is not meant to operate autonomously, itwon’t be making first contact with aliens, i will be, unless they visit my home and mistakenlyassume it is the dominant intelligent life form. for today’s purpose we are assumingthe aliens are not stupid though, that’s

our next assumption, they want to surviveand they are clever. such being the case they will not have identifiedmy toaster as intelligent and me not as intelligent. you just have to be monumentally dense tomiss the signs that earth has intelligent tool-users on it, what with the radio & tvsignals, satellites in orbit, and all those mysteriously squared shaped rocks and treeswith glass windows in them and wires and roads running to them. my toaster is not mobile,on first inspection they couldn’t distinguish it from my computer, microwave, or tv if itwas off, and maybe they’d think it consumed bread. but my doorway’s size, its doorknob,all the handles and chairs and so on, including photos of friends and family on the walls,start to generate a picture.

it’s one thing to mistake a stone axe fora natural object, stuff like the giant’s causeway in ireland can incorrectly look artificialtoo, but it is another thing to mistake a garage and all the tools and vehicles in itfor natural. so we can assume aliens are intelligent ifthey have technology, and we will recognize technology. more accurately we will recognizeintelligence, intelligence knows intelligence. at least any type which will have technology,since that implies curiosity and a value for knowledge and a desire to use it to alteryour environment to enhance survival. there may be exceptions to this, but i suspect notfor reasons we’ll discuss in the future. ditto, it is possible some species might evolveas natural spacefarers, around a collection

of small moons for instance, but it is unlikely,so spacefaring means technology. and technology means they know math and science, which isthe keystone of communication with them. to communicate with someone you need shared concepts,the only universal concepts are things like math and basic physical principles or thingsfound universe-wide. so technological civilizations, especiallythose who can explore space, will be survival-oriented, smart, curious, and clever. they will alsorecognize technology and know it means intelligence made it.this brings up another stupid aliens moment from classic science fiction, and from oneof the best authors who normally does aliens amazingly well. ender’s game by orson scottcard shows us an example of an accidental

violent first contact situation between humanityand a race called the buggers. in this case the aliens arrive in our solar system andattack and board our spaceships and kill crew members and eventually seriously damage chinabefore their first expedition is defeated. they send a second one too which barely losesafter a massive space battle in our solar system.here’s the thing, afterwards the realization comes that the buggers never realized we wereintelligent because they’re really hive mind entities who communicate telepathically.we could never talk to them because they simply have no concept for language. yet the implicationis that the buggers didn’t realize we were intelligent till after they failed to invadeus twice, even though both times they encountered

spaceships. it’s not hard to distinguisha spaceship from a meteor at a distance, and certainly not when one is boarding one andmurdering its crew, so why would one ever think something that was clearly a spaceshipwas not the product of a highly intelligent species?it is still a great book series and one i highly recommend, and the author makes someattempt to fix that issue in later books. i suspect the mistake comes from him expandinga short story into that book as a pseudo-prequel to speaker for the dead, another great bookwhich features quite clever aliens making another first contact screw-up with us whichi won’t spoil. so let us go through our list of nine in ordernow and consider what is significant about

each. this begins with case where we’vealready met them but basically did not know it.a classic staple of scifi is that aliens walk among us, or used to back in the old days.what their motivation for doing this activity might be varies a lot. maybe they’re plottinga takeover, maybe they’re teaching us to build pyramids, maybe they’re doing someanthropology. i figure the assumption of curiosity in technological species makes anthropologya common field for their own past and probably one that would still apply to aliens. i havedifficulty imagining our own anthropologists wouldn’t give their right arm and maybea leg to study an alien civilization and that’s not likely to be limited to humans.now for first contact we have a few specific

things. first, it’s already happened, wejust didn’t know about it as a species, maybe some of us did, maybe none did, maybewe misinterpreted it as gods or whichever, doesn’t matter. second, it means they alreadyhave an advanced knowledge of us including our language and customs, so the responsibilityis entirely on them not screw up that first contact. it’s not an excuse for us to bejerks or idiots, but we don’t know much whereas they do.third, we certainly have a right to ask why they were here without formally revealingthemselves and to expect a good answer. they also don’t have a right to be shocked bythat since they should know our own psychology, so they ought to have a good logical reasonready. when contemplating those it’s important

to do a role reversal and ask how we’d respondto people we’d been monitoring or overtly interacting with in the distant past.from a realistic perspective you don’t need to land on a planet that already has tv andradio to learn enough about them to talk, and also whoever you send down is likely tobe an android. it’s a lot safer to remotely pilot a robot body from orbit configured tolook like the native life. not necessarily a person, a bird or dog or whatever is probablyyour best first bet. the elephant in the room is privacy, becauseyou are spying on people, those being spied on or doing the spying might not care aboutthat as much as us but probably more importantly curious species, even those that care aboutprivacy a lot, will recognize both the desire

for knowledge and the legit concern of notwanting to screw up a first meeting or interacting with the unknown.even with a technological advantage on my side i’d still rather not make friends witha race that is fanatically xenophobic and thinks hitler would have been a great guyif he didn’t have the fault of being a dirty filthy human. particularly since i would beexpecting one of the first questions aliens would ask would be “will you share someof your technology with us?” and i’d have a problem saying no.i’d also have a problem justifying observations that lasted generations. this also raisesthe question of who you contact, because you know enough to be selective. do you contacta government? all of them? if not how many

and which ones? do you call the news and sayyou want to do an interview on tv and just hover your ship next to their broadcast studioso they know it isn’t a joke? there’s probably a right and wrong way to do thisbut i’d probably go the open route from day 1, just relying on what we could hearby radio and tv for the basics and broadcasting my hello on english on all the channels. totalhonesty, here we are, we’re friendly, we’ve got some technology we’ll share but notall of it right away, and that we want permission for a small outpost on the moon or similar,a 100 year lease on some spot in exchange for some spaceflight technologies.things are a different if we come across ruins of a civilization. everything is archeologynow and we have plenty of time to be cautious.

both to avoid damaging stuff and in termsof whatever wiped them out. killing off a technological civilization is quite trickyas we’ve discussed before so unless the method is obvious it behooves you to be cautiouswhile digging around. whatever killed them off might be a factor, and it could be somethingweird too like some existential crisis that induced depression and nihilism, not someovert doomsday device. this does have a special case too. you seethey might all be dead but that does necessarily matter. we can’t rule out that they mighthave had some bunkers that didn’t just include archives but frozen people too, but more tothe point, it does not require any ridiculously advanced technology to find some dna, possiblyeven just digital copies of it in such an

archive, and grow a person. or persons, orall their extinct species too. we’ve discussed that as a last resort option for environmentaldamage in the past, keeps frozen or digital dna of extinct species for future resurrectionwhen we’ve dealt with whatever ecological issues made it occur before.i think we would certainly want to uncover and preserve an alien species civilizationif we found their ruins, but what about actually recreating them and their world? that’snot a first contact case of course, we would probably have to raise their first generationor two of kids so they would definitely know us and not really be the original civilization,though i suppose we could trick them by pretending to be them. i don’t recall any scifi coveringsuch a scenario so it’s probably a pretty

fertile ground for some, but from our perspectiveit is an interesting moral conundrum. do you resurrect a planet if you can? and if youcan, how do you do it? in secret or just tell the young new aliens the whole story, youkilled yourselves off, we cloned you, we taught you, we brought you back and restored you.and can you imagine if someone showed up here one day and told us they had done that forus? now our next case isn’t contact either.it’s the notion that we see them from a distance, not communicate with them at all.this is our most likely way to become aware of alien civilizations too. odds are the firstlife we find will come after we’ve detected indicators of it from back home here. fornon-intelligent life, or at least ones not

up to the point of doing tv and radio signals,we might detect a planet with an oxygen rich atmosphere, which is not conclusive indicationof life but is a strong indicator. oxygen doesn’t like to stick around as agas, it bonds to make rocks or water instead, so large amounts of it imply something iseither preventing that or constantly making a new supply of molecular oxygen. photosynthesisdoes that but not much else does, not that would be present in such large quantitiesas to keep an entire atmosphere oxygen rich. at the bigger scale, we’re not really lookingfor radio signals in seti anymore. or we still do but not many expected that to work anddecades of nothing much have sharpened that viewpoint. the better route is looking forfolks who have been building dyson swarms.

first it indicates they are probably stillaround, since that implies they survived as a species long enough to engage in major spaceexploitation and that they are way less vulnerable to species obliteration now that they arespread out around their solar system. even a now extinct species interest us, but lookingfor a long-lasting one increases the odds of finding them not only alive but at all,since they’re showing signs of their existence for longer.second it can be seen a lot further away. there’s no maximum range on detecting radioand tv signals, if you build a large enough telescope, but as a rule people don’t broadcastlouder than they have to and a signal meant to be heard elsewhere on your own planet doesn’tneed to be nearly as strong as one meant to

be heard by the same antenna on another planet.hundreds of kilometers away not hundred of light years, and there are about 10 trillionkilometers in a light year, and signals weaken inverse square to distance, so 100 trillion,trillion times weaker. actually not as much since the big thing interfering with signalson earth is the planet and atmosphere so it is easier to hear some signals over on themoon then the other side of the planet but that’s not too important today.great big kardashev-2 civilizations can get away with building telescopes that could pickup our tv broadcasts thousands of light years away, but they themselves are quite visiblefrom all the light they are blocking and re-emitting as infrared, something we’ve discussed alot in the fermi paradox episodes. those ought

to be detectable anywhere inside our own galaxywith modern equipment if we’re looking at them.more importantly a species building those up around many stars as they colonize theirgalaxy will be visible at extra-galactic distances. you can look at places, even whole galaxiesand see if they emit too much infrared basically. or too much radio. even if you cannot figurewhat they are saying because it’s encrypted or you just can’t understand it you couldsee it going on. you can also look for signs of spaceships, some types of propulsion wouldbe highly distinct and visible. we can’t talk to them, by listening anyway, we cansend signals ourselves now, but we can being listening more closely to a candidate andbegin drawing conclusions from what we can

see.this gives you a much larger range to examine and since space is a volume, every time youwiden your range by a factor of 10 you increase the possible targets by 10Ⳡor a thousand.if we figure the nearest civilization is a thousand light years from us, we’d expectseveral more just a little bit further away in the other directions and we’d expecta thousand times as many within 10,000 light years. you might only be able to hear radioa thousand light years away but you could detect a dyson swarm a lot further away.this raises another interesting point that applies to first contact because we alwayshave three pieces of knowledge available the moment we meet or see aliens. the first isthat they exist, but the second is that others

do or did, because if we find one just a thousandlight years away it strongly implies our galaxy would contain many thousands more.there’s around a million stars within a thousand light years of us and that impliestechnological civilization are about 1 in a million systems at least if you find anotherthat close to us, there a few hundred billion stars in our galaxy and 1 in a million wouldmean a few hundred thousand civilizations. a conclusion that other alien civilizationwill now also draw if they hadn’t already met someone else, if they have they can refinethat number down a lot more too. but that’s the third thing, they now know the galaxyis pretty cluttered with civilizations if they didn’t already.and that changes the dynamics of first contact,

because you’d have good reason to believeother critters might be watching or find out later what you did. so if you’re thinkingabout genocide you either have to wonder if folks who disapprove of that might see youdoing it, and conclude that they probably will see it, or consider that they might notdisapprove because it’s what they’d do, in which case an alliance with the intendedvictim against some big genocidal badass might be in order.and the universe doesn’t end at the edge of the galaxy either, other galaxies aren’tspaced out like stars are, galaxies are more like small continents with lots of islandsin between them, so intergalactic colonization and warfare is viable. key point is, anythingyou do in space to another species you are

probably doing for a live studio audienceand the folks doing it will know that, so it will effect first contact, especially sinceit will probably be at their planet which is probably monitored by others, and thosemonitors might have gotten to like the folks they’ve been watching and so probably won’tframe you in the kindest light if they are reporting to their superiors that some hostilerace just blew them to smithereens. if you do run into another species in deepspace it is less likely to be seen by others because monitoring a whole galaxy is a wholedifferent story then monitoring every solar system in it. of course if you do bump intoanother ship while traveling between the stars it is almost guaranteed that they are headedto whichever system you left and coming from

whichever one you are headed towards.this pretty much necessitates you both stop and talk, which is a problem since you probablyneed at least weeks to actually slow down and you probably need to slow down to arriveat some chunk of rock and ice you can refuel off of. space is just too huge for such apassage in the night to occur otherwise and it will be very obvious to both parties whereyou are headed and where you’re coming from. they probably will stop too. if they’reexplorers, they’ve just found something worth exploring. if they are colonists, theywill want to know if that destination is now occupied. if they are invaders they will knowthey’ve been exposed. they can’t just blow you up either because you’d be transmittinghome all the time anyway and even if you don’t

have a constant signal home, which you would,they’d have to assume you would transmit once you detected them or have a black boxdesigned to. a lot of interstellar ships would have thin tethers running behind them, oroff to the side, to expand their view for detection, hard to spot such a thing tillyou’re closer enough you’d be spotted for sure too. interstellar spaceships arenot terribly covert objects even when they aren’t firing their engines.which they’d do fairly often incidentally. we’ve never discussed it in any episodesfor time constraints but if you saw the space warfare episode you know the best defenseagainst laser weapons, which are the fastest allowed by known physics, is to make the occasionalsmall course correction. it doesn’t have

to be much or use much fuel, you just picka random direction and apply a little thrust. a change of just a meter per second will meansomeone a light day away won’t know your position to better than a couple hundred kilometers,and when you’re moving millions of meters a second doing a tiny thrust change like thatevery day is a minor fuel expense and a good diagnostic to make sure your engines are stillworking. we also didn’t mention that every interstellar ship has a battery of laser weaponson it that would intimidate modern major nation states. you need those to be able to vaporizeany chunk of debris too small to see soon enough to dodge around. those need to be powerfuland automated, they also need to be guided by some very intense and active radar systemswhich won’t be terribly subtle either.

you have to have such things on your shipand you have an obligation to make sure they don’t shoot other ships. in the classicscifi novel the mote in god’s eye we get an example of that. here a solar sail shipshows up in a human colonized system and opens fire on the ship that approaches it transmittinghellos. this results in a reply that accidentally kills the lone occupant of the ship.the chief scientist for the system is enraged at the response to what he assumes was anautomatic anti-meteor defense, but later an officer from that ship uses an analogy topoint out that you have an ethical obligation to design any anti-meteor defenses not toopen fire on neutral third parties. now you might say how could they know how to identifyone but a spaceship and a meteor do not appear

even a little bit alike. wrong speed, wrongshape, wrong heat signature, even if it is not spewing out megawatts of active radar.if you make an automated weapon you clearly do have an ethical obligation to make surethe odds of it targeting someone it should not are kept to a minimum. and you know itcould be a problem because you have to start with interplanetary ships in your own systemwhich also need anti-meteor lasers. all your ships probably have some sort of iff friendor foe signals but you still have to worry about those breaking or getting jammed soyou’d always want a backup in the targeting system itself that knew some characteristicsships had and meteors had which the other generally does not and won’t shoot withoutan override command if an object is clearly

not a meteor.it is very hard not to realize a spaceship is a spaceship and not a meteor, and you oughtto be able to tell a machine how to figure out which is which. common sense methods besidesshape include it emitting radiation, like radio waves and infrared heat, and movingat the wrong speed for random objects. if you can’t do that maybe you should delayinterstellar travel until you can, but it’s not rocket science to recognize a rocket ship.well, i mean it kind of is rocket science or implies you know rocket science anyway,bad analogy. again intelligence can recognize intelligence.two ships in deep space that see each other and see that their point of departure is theother guy’s point of arrival are probably

going to want to heave to and talk and theywill want to start doing so long before they pass each other, in large part because theyknow if they don’t start by then the other guy is going to seriously consider openingfire on them or using whatever rock they planned to refuel at anyway as the gas station andhardware store to cannon up and chase you back to their home, where there will probablybe a big fleet waiting to beat you up since they probably will get the message you arecoming years before your ship arrives. so you probably do decelerate and either bothsettle onto one icy rock somewhere between your ships or each your own some reasonabledistance apart so you can chat by radio. there will plenty of these, interstellar space ishuge and mostly empty but there are still

tons of icy rocks in it, even big ones, that’swhy they need the lasers and thrusters. the rock is fuel by the way, or rather the iceis, interstellar ships either run on hydrogen or one of its isotopes or can if they needto, unless it’s a fission rocket in which case you will be able to tell it is and youwon’t regard that as a huge threat, even if that’s what you’ve got, and neitherof you is stopping or turning around. instead you’re both expecting to arrive at inhabitedsystems at the total mercy of its inhabitants, so exchanging a lot of radio talk betweenships while you can is a good idea. these will be a lot shorter and faster thanexchanging signals between planets hundreds or thousands of light years apart. that’sour next category and kind of the classic

seti case. there’s not much to say aboutthis. there’s really no contact here either because you can’t ask questions, you sendbig blocks of data, probably constantly, or receive it, and you’ve got all the timein the world to decipher them because spending a few years doing so barely adds to the timelag. you’d mostly have to decide if you wanted to reply right away or not, if youdecide to do so they obvious method is to just repeat their signal back to them, probablywith a follow up or minor modification like flipping all the digits so it was definitelya transmission not a reflection. that tells them that you are interested in talking butdon’t know how yet, so they will keep their eyes open figuring you are trying to deciphertheir language.

of course they won’t get even that mirrorreply till twice as long as the distance between you, send a message to a planet a hundredlight years away and don’t expect any reply for at least 200 years. you’d also guessthey might not immediately reply even with a mirror transmission so it’s a good ideato watch for a while once the minimum time has passed. you should also start listeningsooner too in case they have some outpost nearer to you that replied sooner.now we always have to consider the option they’ve figured out faster than light communication,i sincerely doubt we will ever figure that one out but if we did it is like the lastcase in terms of distance only. you need to communicate more real-time, which opens thedoor for accidents, and you’re not safe

either. the ability to communicate ftl impliesthe ability to send matter or energy that way too. not necessarily a lot of matter either,transmitting a small biological virus or nanomachine that can replicate is all you need to do.the latter can just grey goo a planet or build its own ftl communicator home and build anarmy on site. or maybe they can just send a huge energy beam that way. interesting invasiontechnique too, if the communicator has to be built on the other side to send anything,you transmit the blueprints to build an ftl radio by classic radio and when someone picksup to say hi, out pops your invasion and colonization crews.our next option is that we visit them and make contact. that implies we are the moretechnologically advanced or if not that they

are a stay-at-home civilization, somethingwe discussed last month. for the latter your big concern is how they view visitors, anduninvited visitors at that, considering a technologically advanced species shouldn’tbe first contacted in person that way. you might dispatch a ship right behind your ownfirst communications to expedite dialogue but it should get there later than the messageand that message presumably included telling them you were sending a ship which would turnback if they asked it to. as to a non-advanced species, like us contactingourselves back in antiquity, we have the option of either just landing and saying hi or goingthrough the various anthropological options we discussed earlier. alien biology not beingcompatible with our own, in all likelihood,

we would not just want to land and get out,exposing us and them to all our germs and theirs. i’d survey from above for signsof intelligence, those can be visible from orbit like pyramids or canals. after observingwhat we can from low orbit telescopes i’d drop drones far away from any signs of civilizationand do some observing, even if just to find out what sort of local fauna there is andhow it behaves so i can send more drones concealed as those for close observation.why are doing this? because we have all the cards and so also have an obligation to comein with a good amount of knowledge so we don’t mess up. an obligation big enough to justifywhat i regard as committing a fairly serious crime of invading those people’s privacy.i’m going to be wanting to learn the languages

and customs so i know how to apologize andcompensate those folks for spying on them, which is another reason i wouldn’t approveof prolonged observations that took generations. a lot of science fiction encourages us torespect primitive alien cultures and not interfere with them, i understand the logic and partiallyagree, but i’ve never quite understood the logic behind it being okay to spy on them.i justify it by trying to learn as much as we can quickly so we can talk to them as equals,just ones who have less technology, something we can offer to show them and teach them toimprove their lives. spying on people just to satisfy your curiosity about them is avery dubious ethical position. were it a totally safe one it would mean reading people’semails was just fine so long as you didn’t

get caught and they never found out.when encountering the unknown you have a certain obligation, to both your people and that unknown,to be decently well-prepared. that justifies some limited spying because it reduces therisk to all parties, but it doesn’t just make it okay either. the obligation is greateron you because you have more tools and knowledge on your side. same reason if you’re a doctorpresent at an accident you’re the one expected to try to fix the injured people, and whyit’s okay to dig through their wallet or cellphone to see if they’ve got any existingconditions that might be relevant. this is also why even if you don’t think you arelikely to encounter any aliens with some colony ship you send out you still have an obligationto have designed a first contact protocol

and made sure the captain knows of it, evenif it is just knowing one exists and the name of the file.for our next case we have the example of meeting people through a third party. we already metsome aliens and we asked them if they knew any others. if they say yes then we oughtto ask them for the relevant information like languages and protocols.in the 1990s scifi tv series babylon 5 we get an example of a first contact situationthat went bad, ending with us firing on alien ships, the minbari, and killing their leader.this leads to them trying to commit genocide against us. the details were left vague tillsome years later when they did a made-for-tv movie on it and they fill in the blanks, badlytoo. we get details on them from another race

and later on yet another race has an ambassadorwho fatally obliterates the plot by casually offering to help negotiate at a secret summitsince he is fluent in both human and minbari languages. up until that moment there wasat least a vague hope that prior contact of everyone involved hadn’t involved communication.i’ll skip the details but the entire incident occurs because of neither side, includingthe one who has been spacefaring and in contact with aliens for at least a thousand years,having any language files for other species who both have come into contact with. there’sblame to spread around but it mostly falls on the alien minbari here, since they hadthe advantages. this applies to their actions afterwards too, since when you know you havethe tech and firepower edge and you know they

knew it too, you should guess that if theyshot at you and ran away they probably were spooked into doing it, not trying to provokea conflict they’d know they’d lose. this brings us to our last case, where thealiens come and visit us. it is quite common in fiction to have thealiens do something that spooks human into some response then afterwards condemns ourrash actions. there’s an episode of the outer limits, the 1990’s incarnation, titled“trial by fire” where a newly sworn in president has to deal with an approachingobject traveling at half the speed of light. this object barely misses earth and crashesinto the moon instead, needless to say doing huge amounts of damage. after a moment ofcelebration at this narrowly avoided doom

the astronomers inform the president thatthey’ve detected a fleet of alien ships. they also hit one of our satellites with anenergy pulse that disables it. bad clichã©s ensue. the scientists argue the pulse disablingthe satellite was probably an accident, the president’s wife tries to convince him ofthe alien peaceful intent. the generals encourage him to assume it is an invasion and nuke them.the aliens are repeating a signal we can’t translate. the scientists realize that theobject that hit the moon was an infinite power source and argue it was meant to be a gift,not a weapon. the president transmits a message welcomingthe aliens to earth but insisting they stay in orbit for the time being. one of the shipslands in the ocean anyway, gets fired on by

the russians, and it destroys the ships. wedeploy a nuke against the alien fleet, it fails and they launch two objects at moscowand dc. just before those arrive they translate the message finally, realizing it was in englishall along but distorted by the aliens speaking inside water, and it says “let us be yourfriends”, the president and his wife mournfully embrace before being incinerated.i’m not quite sure what the moral of the story is, but if an earth fleet did that andtheir commander came back telling me about it i’d have the incompetent fool shot.the moral of the story is supposed to be that we screwed up and provoked the aliens, inreality the aliens were absolute morons. they understand english, meaning they were listeningto our radio signals, meaning they know exactly

how we communicate. they would know whichbands of radio to transmit on and exactly how much power to send that transmission withso that their message, in perfectly understandable english, would show up on everyone’s tvsand radios. that’s the big take away for first contact,one side is almost always at a knowledge advantage. no ship has any business arriving here withoutalready knowing our language because we’ve been sending it out for decades and they shouldhave spent decades listening to it on the way here and deciphering it. honestly evenif their computers are no better than ours are now they ought not need long to figureit out with the sheer quantity of signals we’ve produced in the last century.so anyone coming here should know our language

already. this is one of the reasons, the otherbeing time, that we’re not doing alien languages today, only for the example of two ships runninginto each other in deep space – which is frankly highly improbable – should you everhave a case where one of the parties hadn’t had plenty of time to learn and get comfortablewith the language first. we could, and probably will, do an episode on deciphering alien signalsor how we should send our own, but in short form its all math and physics, because thoseare the only guaranteed shared concepts of technological civilizations.if they come from our own universe anyway, folks dialing us up from some higher dimensionwhere they don’t have gravity or stars or even atoms might be a different story. somethingwe’ll discuss another time. for now the

key concept is that in all probability firstcontact will always occur twice, the first time when species a finds out b exists andspends time deciphering their language, and the second time when b finds out a existsbecause species a sends them a formal greeting in their own language.we’ve still got tons of stuff to cover but that will finish us up for the day. next weekwe will be looking at weather control and geoengineering concepts, essentially how toterraform our own planet. the week after that we’ll return to the alien civilizationsseries to look at crazy aliens, and unlike last week’s episode on stupid aliens, thistime we won’t be look at our misconceptions from fiction but instead how actual aliensmight have behaviors we’d view as nuts or

vice-versa. this will be our first attemptto genuinely look inside a hypothetical alien mind.a couple quick announcements before we end for the day.first, all the episodes come with captions as you know, but mostly in english, we’vehad volunteers who have kindly translated many of the episodes into other languages,and i want to thank them, but we’re always looking for more and if you’re bilingualand interested in trying your hand at one, let me know in the comments below where i’llalso leave some explanations pinned at the top of the comments secion.second, since i haven’t announced it in a while, all episodes are also available forfree audio download over on soundcloud, and

i always include a link to those in the episodedescription. some folks prefer to listen to these when driving and i try to accommodatethat. i always post two versions, one with music and one without.okay, announcements complete, again next week is weather control and geoengineering. toget alerts when that and other episodes come out, make sure to subscribe to the channel.if you enjoyed this episode, make sure to like it and share it with others.until next time, thanks for watching, and have a great week!