An international committee of experts says it has updated its rules for evaluating and revealing the detection of extraterrestrial intelligence.
The revisions to the decades-old Declaration of Principles, created and maintained by the International Academy of Astronautics’ SETI Committee, come just days before the release of “Disclosure Day,” a movie about alien visitation directed by Steven Spielberg.
This is the first major update to the committee’s protocols in more than 15 years. “The information environment we operate in today is vastly more complex than it was in 2010,” committee chair Michael Garrett, an astrophysics professor at the University of Manchester, said in a news release. “In an era of deepfakes, automated misinformation and instant global connectivity, a single unverified claim could trigger confusion or panic. These new protocols ensure that scientists maintain the highest standards of evidence before making announcements to the world.”
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence, more widely known as SETI, has become just as vastly more complex. At first, SETI primarily involved monitoring radio emissions for patterns that could point to intentional signaling. Now the search has widened to watch for excess infrared heat signatures, optical laser emissions or even anomalous gravitational waves.
In its revised protocols, the IAA SETI Committee acknowledges the new modes of SETI research as well as the emerging challenges facing SETI researchers. It calls for the organizations that support those researchers to shield them from harassment, doxing, intense media scrutiny and other “negative professional repercussions.”
The guidelines confirm that SETI practitioners and their institutions should be able to report their activities and share their results publicly. They should be free to respond to reasonable inquiries from news outlets, social-media platforms and other information channels. But the guidelines stress that no public announcement confirming alien contact should be made until a signal or an artifact has been authenticated by independent organizations using different instrumentation.
“We do not shout ‘alien’ the moment we see a strange blip,” Garrett said. “The scientific method demands we check, check again, and then ask others to check. Only when we have reached a consensus that a signal is credible do we bring it to the world.”
If the evidence of extraterrestrial origin is deemed credible, the discoverers or their institutions should promptly report their conclusion to the scientific community and the U.N. secretary-general — and be given the opportunity to make the first public announcement.
If E.T. phones, don’t rush to answer
A formal verification report should be distributed to relevant organizations including the IAA, the International Astronomical Union, the Committee on Space Research, the International Telecommunications Union and the U.N. Office of Outer Space Affairs. Verification data should be stored in at least two tamper-proof repositories in different geographic locations, and open-access publication of the data is encouraged.
The IAA SETI Committee says it will set up a Post-Detection Subcommittee that can engage with news organizations and social-media platforms to help disseminate accurate information. And it says no one should try to reply to an extraterrestrial signal until there are appropriate international consultations, with the United Nations and other broadly representative international organizations playing the leading roles.
The revised declaration was ratified by the full board of the Paris-based IAA, and a technical presentation is scheduled for October at the International Astronautical Congress in Turkey.
“The release of these updated rules and protocols marks an important step in acknowledging both the radically different media landscape that science functions within today, and the vastly expanded efforts in terms of technology and resources being deployed in the search for intelligent life beyond Earth,” said committee member Bill Diamond, president and CEO of the California-based SETI Institute. “We applaud Professor Garrett’s leadership in developing these new protocols, and the IAA for their ratification.”
Balancing rigor and candor
Douglas Vakoch, president of METI International, said in an email that the updated protocol “tries to strike a balance between letting SETI scientists conduct their research in a rigorous fashion and the competing demand to keep the public informed about what would be one of humankind’s greatest discoveries.”
“The better the public understands the complex process of confirming whether a signal from aliens is real, the better they will understand the vital need to foster one of the hardest of human virtues: patience,” he said.
Vakoch said the updated protocol recognizes that “everything changes once we detect a signal from alien intelligence.”
“Finally we will be able to gain the attention of the United Nations and other international bodies that so far have refused to make this a priority. Once we have a confirmed detection, we’ll finally be able to convene a globally representative assembly to decide how best to respond,” he said. “Until then, we need to move ahead with our attempt to make first contact in the same way SETI scientists always have — by recruiting experts who recognize the importance of these issues even before we know for sure there’s other life in the universe.”
Vakoch, who has studied the options for communicating with aliens since his high-school days in the late 1970s, noted that the protocol specifically avoids addressing “the separate and distinct subject of messaging to extraterrestrial intelligence in advance of a confirmed detected extraterrestrial signal,” a strategy known as METI.
“Though METI scientists have always sought a broad-based, global discussion of how best to communicate with other technological civilizations, including the ethical and practical issues of how best to represent humankind, they face the same challenges as SETI scientists in gaining access to organizations like the United Nations,” Vakoch said. “The new protocol explicitly recognizes that sending messages to the stars before we make first contact requires a different process than the one that’s laid out for sending a response to a signal we receive from space.”
This report was published on Universe Today with the headline “SETI Panel Revises Recommendations for Dealing With ‘Disclosure Day.” Licensed for republication under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
