The moment of first contact with extraterrestrials is a staple of science fiction. It usually involves a frantic scientist having a Eureka moment, realising in a single dramatic instant that Earth is being visited by creatures from light-years away.
Aliens are in the public consciousness once again thanks to Steven Spielberg’s latest film, Disclosure Day, which follows a whistleblower’s attempts to reveal extraterrestrial visitations to the world.
In reality, the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence is far more likely to emerge as a faint anomaly in astronomical data, followed by a slow, painstaking process of verification, peer review and intense international deliberation. There might be no single Eureka moment, and no lone scientist with the answer.
As our telescopes have advanced, so too has the complexity of the world we live in. That is why a committee of the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) has just voted to accept a major overhaul of the “post-detection protocols” – the scientific code of conduct for what happens after we find evidence of life beyond Earth.
The IAA body that has approved the changes is the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Seti) Committee. Seti is the collective term for scientific projects dedicated to searching for signs of intelligent alien life in the universe.
The previous version of these principles was adopted way back in 2010. To put that in perspective, in 2010, the “fake news” era hadn’t quite arrived, social media was in its infancy, and the broader idea of “technosignatures”, looking for signs of alien technology such as waste heat from giant structures in space, was still largely on the fringes of mainstream astronomy.
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