What If...

Let's say you are the president of the United States and you are having a pretty lazy afternoon, just hanging around the Oval Office catching up on your soaps or whatever. Suddenly, all the phones start ringing as everybody from the State Department to the Joint Chiefs and even the D.C. police are calling about a large saucer shaped craft that just landed on the National Mall. What are you going to do?

OK, after you have taken that stiff drink, what do you do next? It's a good question that doesn't seem to have an actual straight forward answer. Most likely, there is some form of protocol in place. Experience suggests that it will go something along the same lines as what happened in similar situations.

When NASA was about to present the possibility that they had found fossils in a Martian rock, the results were first taken to then President Bill Clinton in order to prepare him to prepare the nation for the shocking discovery of...well, of like maybe dead Martians (by the way, so far the world has pretty much been capable of dealing with this discovery - much more so than some geologists). Naturally, Pres. Clinton admittedly told the news to his main spin doctor, Dick Morris. In turn, Morris made a quick retreat to a hotel room and blabbed the whole story out to a call girl. OK, this isn't exactly much of a protocol. According to most reports, the call girl wasn't even all that impressed by the story. Guess she wasn't into geology.

In 2004, an asteroid appeared to have been heading toward the earth. President George W. Bush was immediately alerted and for the next nine hours the White House held phone briefings with various other foreign heads of state in order to prepare them for an impact. Oddly enough, while all of this chatting was going on, nothing was actually done that might have suggested any kind of attempt at the most basic level of public preparedness. The debate was kept secret and, I suspect, was mostly about who got to race for the bunker first. Screw the public.

So the known track record for certain types of events isn't exactly fantastic. One would hope that the current administration might do a better job. The current farce with the Gulf oil spill suggests otherwise. President Obama might be tempted to simply form a committee and then move on to something else.

Which is too bad. Alien contact is not such a strange possibility. It is even possible that it has already happen, the so-called Wow signal being just one of several distinct moments. Unfortunately, the known details of such events suggest that if it were left strictly to the scientific community, they would simply dick around with the issue for a few decades and then, maybe, publish a paper.

At the political level, the only known decision concerning aliens appears to be the infamous order by Harry S. Truman to shoot them down. Who knows, maybe the aliens need to be taught a lesson or two. But an itchy trigger finger doesn't exactly set the stage for a very productive greeting.

It also doesn't help that no real public effort has been made to prepare the world for this highly plausible moment. Sure, a long history of Hollywood movies and TV shows have sort of prepared the general public for alien contact. But the effort has been, at best, a little half baked and poorly defined. The main upside is that most of the general public is half-equipped to deal with the concept, contrary to the panic-inducing notions of the old Brookings Institute report.

Ironically, the general public may now be in better mental condition to deal with alien contact than most of the so-called intellectual class. For the past fifty years, the subject of aliens has been successfully treated with scorn and ridicule. A sizable amount of the intellectual class (academics, scientists, etc.) have largely treated the subject as a goofy idea and are extremely ignorant of the current situation. In turn, they are the people most invested in an intellectual understanding of reality that will be at best sorely tested (if not torn asunder) by the process of alien contact. They have the most to loose. In all likelihood, they will be the ones who will be least capable of grasping the issues if, and when, events unfold. In many respects, first contact will be the end of the world as they know it. Likewise, the higher the intellect, the greater the fall. Many of them will never recover from the blow and I suspect that an entire generation will go missing from the shock. The average person will most likely do OK, but the tenured faculty folks can simply cash it in the minute the first craft publicly lands.

Which is too bad. They are also the same people whose help in understanding the situation will be critically needed. But they are unprepared for this event. They have had a lifetime of denial and denial is a hard habit to easily break.