David Brin is a scientist, tech consultant, and world-renowned author. His dystopian novel, The Postman, was made into a movie starring Kevin Costner. Winner of the prestigious Hugo Award (twice) and a Nebula Award winner, Brin has also been one of the preeminent figures in the small and specialized "First Contact" community.
He has served on the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Permanent Committee, including the "Transmissions From Earth" subcommittee. The group is tasked with drafting international protocols and guidelines for how humanity should handle extraterrestrial detection, first contact, and active transmissions into deep space.
He has also served on the council of external advisers for NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, which has developed U.S. government protocols for "First Contact" scenarios.
Within these roles, Brin has been a leading voice advocating for caution regarding active radio messaging into space, arguing that humanity should establish clear international protocols before broadcasting our presence to potential extrasolar intelligence.
Brin's thinking is simple: We're not going to get a second chance at First Contact. Rather than roll the dice and hope the aliens are benign, better make absolutely certain before announcing our presence to strangers.
"The mystery of the Great Silence, or 'Fermi Paradox,' has joined the Drake Equation as a key metaphor in appraising both the possibility of Extra-Terrestrial Civilization (ETC) and our own prospects to flourish as a progressive, outward-looking species," Brin writes in "Should We Message ET?" on his blog.
"So, where are they?" Nobel Prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi asked during a lunch at Los Alamos in 1950 at the Fuller Lodge with fellow physicists Edward Teller, Herbert York, and Emil Konopinski. The men were having a light-hearted conversation about faster-than-light travel and the possibility of alien life and civilizations.
Suddenly, in the middle of the meal, Fermi blurted out, "So, where are they?" The rest of the table immediately understood what he was talking about. Fermi had been quietly running back-of-the-envelope calculations during lunch regarding the age of the galaxy, the sheer number of stars, the probability of Earth-like planets, and the time required for a technological civilization to colonize the galaxy.
His conclusion was that even at modest travel speeds, an advanced civilization could easily cross and colonize the entire galaxy in a few tens of millions of years. Since the Milky Way is billions of years old, aliens should have visited Earth already or left obvious evidence of their presence. The stark contradiction between the high mathematical probability of extraterrestrial life and the complete lack of physical evidence became known as the "Fermi Paradox"
Many theories have been advanced to solve the paradox, but none have done so satisfactorily. Perhaps advanced civilizations almost always destroy themselves. Maybe Earth-like planets are far rarer than we believe. The serendipity of having both a moon and huge planets like Jupiter and Saturn to deflect or absorb asteroid and comet impacts could be unheard of elsewhere. How many promising planets where life arose have been snuffed out because they inhabit a solar system that routinely sends comets and asteroids careening toward their sun? It only takes one to destroy a nascent civilization.
Perhaps life itself forms easily, but the leap from simple unicellular organisms to complex, tool-using, conscious life might be an astronomical fluke that rarely, if ever, happens twice. We have no other example we can point to, so that very well may be true.
Maybe a critical evolutionary or technological barrier exists that almost no civilization can pass. If the filter is behind us (e.g., origin of life), we are extraordinarily lucky. If the filter is ahead of us (e.g., civilizations routinely destroy themselves via nuclear war, runaway AI, asteroid impact, or climate collapse before developing interstellar travel), not so much.
Suppose that despite all the obstacles and against all odds, we receive the unmistakable signal from one of the numerous telescopes looking for life. Its origin would have to be within a few dozen light-years to establish realistic two-way contact.
Prof Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist at Harvard University and something of a gadfly in the scientific community, runs the Galileo Project, an attempt to locate technological artifacts trapped in our cosmic backyard.
“Any spacecraft launched with a speed less than 20 times our fastest rocket will stay bound by gravity to the Milky Way,” he says.
“So we can look around. It’s like space archaeology – we’re checking if there are any technological probes or objects that were launched over the past 10 billion years.”
For Loeb and other researchers, First Contact is not a question of "if" — it's a question of "when."
“I think there’s not only growing interest, but growing realization that the discovery of life beyond our Solar System, whether it’s basic and microbial or advanced and intelligent, is perhaps not that far into the future,” Bill Diamond told the BBC. Diamond is the CEO of the SETI Institute.
“Every star in the sky is a solar system, and about 30 per cent of the worlds around them are likely to be Earth-like and in the habitable zone of their host star,” Diamond says.
“So the implication is tens of billions of potentially habitable planets in our own galaxy alone. Evidence is mounting that the statistical probability that we’re alone in the Universe is zero.”
We're back to Fermi and his paradox. There are at least three possibilities — one horrible, one reassuring, and one disappointing — for why we haven't heard from anyone.
The first possibility is that no one is talking because several bad actors out there in the cosmos make it suicidal to announce your presence. It's at least as possible as the reassuring scenario that aliens know we're here but won't talk to us because we're obviously not prepared. Another possibility is that intelligent life really is incredibly rare, perhaps only one or two planets in a galaxy. Life itself might be abundant, but intelligent life rarely forms.
There are dozens of other possibilities, but the consensus among scientists is that these are the most probable.
In 1989, researchers drew up what are known as the SETI post-detection protocols, a series of non-binding guidelines governing how the international scientific community should respond if ET does phone home.
The protocols have just been updated – coincidentally, they were endorsed by the International Academy of Astronautics the same week that Spielberg’s new film was released.
But don’t grab your tinfoil hats just yet: the update was mainly intended to reflect the ways the world has changed since 1989.
Today, the internet, social media and AI all mean that a discovery – or a false positive – could become global news before researchers have a chance to study and verify it.
“Verification is really important. The first priority is to get another research group using independent equipment to repeat what you’ve done – repeat the observation,” says Prof Michael Garrett, director of the Jodrell Bank centre for astrophysics at the University of Manchester.
The hysteria and frenzy generated by a confirmed contact with another species would be something to see. I hope I'm alive when it happens.
But I'm not holding my breath.
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