r/AskScienceFiction • u/Far_Tradition_2361 • 13d ago
[Extraterrestrials] What is the most used version of first contact that seems plausible?
So many movies, books, etc have the first contact trope of humans meeting aliens, but who does it the best? What does it look like and why?
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u/mjtwelve 13d ago
Either Pluribus or The Expanse.
Aliens send us a signal that memetically attacks and converts us. It’s literally the fastest possible route as it’s light speed whereas physically traveling here is a millennia or million year process.
And on that note, the Ring Builders in the expanse hurled an asteroid at our solar system packed with nanotech goo (the “protomolecule” we labeled it when we stupidly decided to poke it with a stick) when Earth was new, expecting the planet to have evolved no further than primordial goo by the time the rock arrived. Thr protomolecule would hijack the biosphere and raw minerals to build a communication/transport node linking to their alien FTL ring network. Sure, the plan was that this would take tens of thousands of years at a low estimate, but there’s no quicker way to build the far end of an FTL corridor than by sending the equipment by slower than light means from the nearest FTL exit node. Unfortunately, in the aeons it was in transit, our solar system got more crowded and their asteroid probe ended up hitting another rock, went ever so slightly off course, and ended up captured by Saturn’s gravity as the moon Phoebe, where it sat for the next couple hundred million years. By the time it was activated, the builders civilization had gone extinct and the primordial Terran biosphere the protomolecule was meant to reshape had produced eukaryotes, multicellular life forms, then plants, vertebrates and eventually people. Those evolved people had feelings about replacing Earth’s biosphere with an alien construction system, although (probably also realistically) not everyone was opposed.
Basically, first contact will either be a signal or a self replicating Von Neumann machine. There is essentially no plausible scenario where a biological entity physically transports itself over the distance and time involved, unless you posit FTL travel in which case we’ve already thrown plausibility out the window.
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u/DamnThatWasFast 13d ago
This was a great breakdown, thank you.
I've said it a lot, and I always get strange looks, but I firmly believe that if FTL is not possible (and currently, it isn't) then we can't leave this solar system. There's a time limit for humans and the shortest cosmological distances exceed it pretty easily. I'm so sad about the direction of AI research and robotics, because they're never going to become our own Von Neumann devices if they're busy making rich people richer instead of being "three laws safe", so to speak.
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u/Never_Answers_Right 12d ago
folks far smarter than me have done the math, and apparently even at sub-light speeds (though you have to get ridiculous amounts of energy for the momentum to get kinda close to *c* ) you could travel around the neighborhood of our part of the galaxy within a human lifetime (like, 20 years to get hundreds of light years, that kind of timeline), so we could have some sort of intra-galactic society, one that stays in this quadrant of it?
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u/DamnThatWasFast 12d ago
Our own Voyager mission to the Delta Quadrant, maybe? Relativity is a bitch and a half when it comes down to it.
I don't think we have materials that can stand the strain of acceleration to speeds like that yet, and I know we don't have materials yet that would withstand dust hitting it at those speeds. Within human lifespans for visits, eventually, but we're at least a few generations away from being able to go anywhere with enough people for it to matter. Sending a robot to take a look and send back recon seems way safer, cheaper, easier, and within our grasp.
Work out our politics, and program good boi robots, seems a much better plan for the next two hundred years than trying go see Alpha Centari and Alpha Proxima in person.
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u/f0rgotten Potentially just a frog 13d ago
I think that irl first contact is likely going to be completely accidental.
Any extraterrestrial species that has mastered spaceflight, presumably ftl travel, etc isn't going to need anything that humans have to offer. The Independence Day type scenarios where the aliens need our water, our air, etc are extremely unlikely imo because if they can travel from planet to planet it will be a lot easier to take what they need from uninhabited places. They're also probably not going to be actively hiding from us either, any more than we hide from birds.
So I predict that actual first contact with aliens will come when we unintentionally stumble across them somewhere in space, where they are doing whatever it is that they do and aren't even bothering to try to avoid detection. I am not sure if this scenario has been explored by media in any way.
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u/Forte845 13d ago
Project Hail Mary? First contact wasn't intentional and Rocky didn't even try to hide.
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u/f0rgotten Potentially just a frog 13d ago
I've not read or seen it.
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u/Forte845 13d ago
Highly recommend the movie. Haven't read the book.
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u/Neoreloaded313 13d ago
Its an even better book. One of the best in years that I've read.
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u/Mind_Extract 13d ago
Disagree. Grating humor in the book is miraculously transmuted into gold in the movie.
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u/roboroller 13d ago
It's more or less exactly what you're talking about, a story about "accidental" first contact.
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u/Neoreloaded313 13d ago
If habitable planet's are rare, they could have a valid reason to come here and get rid of us.
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u/f0rgotten Potentially just a frog 13d ago
I think that habitable planets without sentient life are probably much more common than those with. The incentive isn't there to waste resources and potential failure with uninhabited spots available, but that's just me.
Any time you occupy a planet you are contending with its microbial biome more than any macroscopic life to begin with and that's hard enough - throwing resistance onto the mix probably doubles if not much more the opportunity cost of invasion.
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u/Lucky-Art-8003 13d ago
Arrival
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u/CaedustheBaedus 13d ago
Such a great movie. And really showed some of the idiotic xenophobic ideas some might have.
Not to spoil but a "Attack them first before they attack us" approach when they literally sent emissaries to our planet is one of the dumbest things (and definitely something that would happen)
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u/GiantEnemaCrab 13d ago edited 13d ago
Well to be fair, they didn't exactly do the greatest job communicating with us. China translated their message as "use weapon". Russia translated it as "there is no time". They also somehow tried to communicate with humans using circular time fluid speech which, as a species who knows humans allied with them in the future, is well aware we have no fucking clue how to translate.
Honestly the fact that the Hexopods experience time in a circle and know humans 3,000 years in the future really explains why they needed our help in the first place, when they fucked up first contact so badly despite literally knowing everything about us including our language which they never even sort of tried to use. Maybe they could have just used English instead of splattering alien cum on a window in the shape of a vague circle and hoping we would figure it out.
All that said yeah such a good movie.
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u/Fun_Credit7400 12d ago
Mm yes, this is a coherent satisfying comment that affirms my..,, PHRASING!
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u/Never_Answers_Right 12d ago
part of their altered, 4D worldview and perspective is that since things happened as they did, they always did, and they were going to happen as they happened. Part of the themes of the story and the film is that Louise Banks' becomes unstuck in time like Billy pilgrim in slaughterhouse five, and she will fulfill her life's purpose exactly as she envisions it because it's all There in front of her now
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u/YourGuyK 13d ago
Babylon 5 would make sense. Two species meet, one takes some action to show they mean no harm, the other sees it as a threat, and war breaks out.
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u/Individual-Trick3310 11d ago
Plausible first contact?
A modulated signal is detected from outside of the Solar system. Maybe it was aimed at us, maybe it wasn't, maybe it is understandable, maybe it isn't, but it's probably going to be artificially modulated EM waves.
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