You can tell it's silly season, because the news has had a few articles pop up claiming senior US politicians are going to release proof that aliens exist and they've met them. Of course, my first reaction was "so what is the news they don't want us to know about ?"
But whether it's real or not, I think it's likely aliens do exist. We're gradually filling in the numbers in the Drake Equation which shows statistically whether there really are aliens out there. But if they do exist, I'm not quite sure why they'd want to visit a primitive backwater planet like ours.
Then I started to wonder what would happen if aliens actually did reveal themselves in public.....
Image by Daniela Realpe from Pixabay
How Would The Authorities React ?
I reckon whichever country the aliens landed in, the government would try to hide it. They would claim it was to prevent panic, of course, but in reality it would be in the hopes of keeping it to themselves. They'd be hoping to negotiate with the aliens for some technological advantage.
Meanwhile, the legacy media would publish exactly what they were told to. Boring stories of unrelated scandals, a bit of jingoism, and some drama around a Z-list celebrity. Anything but aliens.
I suspect word would get out soon enough anyway, through citizen journalists and social media. Unless the aliens were lucky enough to land in North Korea, of course....
How Would The Public React ?
The public reaction to aliens would inevitably border on the hysterical. In both directions. You'd have people panicking and declaring that it was the end of the world, and others saying the aliens were coming to save us from ourselves and bring a new golden age as part of some galactic federation.
Probably the biggest crisis would be in the major world religions, particularly the monotheistic ones. Unless aliens were completely humanoid (unlikely !), there'd be instant schisms of all kinds. Some would come to the conclusion that if the god they believed in made humans in his image, the aliens must be devils because they aren't 100% like us. Or have their own god who looked like them. Or the same god as ours but who adopts different forms.
All the possible permutations would, I suspect, lead most religions to fracture into factions happily blowing each other up, while many worshippers would give the whole thing up as a bad idea and just walk away from it all.
There would inevitably be large numbers of people who wanted to try to talk to the aliens in person, despite inevitable efforts by governments to prevent it. Some would just be curious, others would think they could make some kind of deal, or would want to take a ride back to the aliens' homeworld.
Some, of course, would just be the insane or fanatical (and those whose minds broke when the aliens arrived); these could easily cause an interstellar diplomatic incident. Their actions could be violent, culturally insensitive, or just downright weird and unpredictable ! In a global population of several billion, even a tiny percentage of crackpots could be a significant threat, and we all know how crazy humans can be !
How Would Aliens View Us ?
This could be the biggest problem. If the aliens have the technology to get from wherever they live to here (either with a faster-than-light drive, some kind of stasis, or because they are machines that don't have to worry about lifespan), it is very likely they'll have technologies way ahead of ours, and probably incomprehensible to us.
Governments wanting to steal or bargain for that technology might find they literally have nothing to offer in return that the aliens might want. The aliens in turn might look down on us as completely inferior, or if we're lucky, just quaint and curious.
We'd have to find out why the aliens were here. It might be hard to find out, especially if they were anything more than a bunch of tourists. It's certain that they wouldn't have the equivalent of Star Trek's "Prime Directive", because that would mean they shouldn't have introduced themselves in the first place.
But it is quite possible that their reasons would be incomprehensible to primitives like us. Science fiction and Hollywood have given us all kinds of possibilities, from stealing our resources or colonising our world (if we Terraform planets, what would they do to Earth - Exoform or Xenoform it ?), to wanting to trade for what to them would be exotic primitive artworks, or just absorbing us into their empire.
What Would The End Result Be ?
I think the end result would almost inevitably be disastrous for humanity.
Assuming the aliens were here with positive motives such as research or tourism, and weren't just planning to bulldoze Earth to make way for a hyperspace bypass, we would still be confronted with a massive blow to our collective confidence.
How could we ever catch up with a civilisation so far above us ? What would be the point of going to the stars when someone else got there before us ? We wouldn't be pioneers, just the latest yokels to arrive in town.
If we look back at human history, the example of what happens when an outward-looking society meets an insular one is almost always the same, especially when the new arrivals appear technologically superior. European empires colonised the world, often using more advanced technology, but sometime just relying on the cultural difference of much higher levels of ruthlessness and aggression.
Disease is unlikely to be a factor with aliens (unless they do it deliberately), but even without that, it always ends badly for the locals.
The best we can probably hope for is to be seen as so dangerous but also interesting for research that after a first visit the aliens treat us as we treat the Sentinalese islanders. Quarantined, left alone, and studied from afar. Oh wait, they may already be doing that....