Out There by Michael Wall

Author:Michael Wall
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2018-11-12T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

How Would the World Be Told?

Any SETI scientist who gets a promising ping from the great beyond knows what to do next: paint the face of a smiling Grey on 10,000 Ping-Pong balls, lug the lot to the top of the Empire State Building, and drop them all onto the garbage-strewn streets below.

Actually, that’s a half-truth. There is an established protocol for how to follow up on a detection and communicate a confirmed discovery to the masses, but it differs in several key respects from the one outlined above.

The real instructions, which were adopted by the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) in 1989, consist of nine rather wordy “principles for disseminating information about the detection of extraterrestrial intelligence.”7 These can be distilled into three basic points.

First, check the signal out to make sure it’s the real deal. This is a commonsense measure that probably doesn’t need to be in there at all; it’s hard to imagine a researcher rushing to announce a discovery before ruling out false positives from orbiting satellites and other sources, which happen all the time in the SETI world. Such confirmation would likely come from a different radio telescope than the one that made the initial detection. If both instruments pick up the same narrow-band signal coming from the same deep-space source, then you’re probably clear to proceed to the next step.

Second, don’t keep it a secret. The discovery team is supposed to tell the broader SETI community so others can vet it as well. The president or prime minister or junta chief of the nation where the team leader is based should also be looped in—but these bigwigs don’t get the honor of announcing the find to the world. That falls to the discoverers themselves, presumably at a press conference that will be fairly well attended.

That last bit may surprise you. Maybe you thought the secretary-general of the United Nations would deliver the news at a special meeting in New York or from the subterranean diamond lair where the global elites meet to discuss alien visitation, the nearly complete plot to create a one-world government controlled by the Freemasons, and other important secret business. But, while the UN would be informed about a detection, the organization has no formally outlined role in spreading the big news.

“We’ve approached the UN with these protocols,” said Seth Shostak, who chaired the IAA’s SETI Permanent Committee for 10 years. “They don’t have any interest, actually. I think that, if you want to get something really incorporated into the UN’s business, you have to have a champion. You have to have some country—you know, Paraguay or somebody has to think, ‘Man, this is really important.’ Otherwise, they’ve got other fish to fry.”

Indeed, there has been no big push from Paraguay or anybody else on this issue, said Simonetta Di Pippo, director of the UN’s Office for Outer Space Affairs.

“The Office for Outer Space Affairs serves United Nations member states, and the office has been given no mandate by member

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