Science
First contact with aliens could end in colonization and genocide if we don’t learn from history
Last Updated on March 15, 2026 by Daily News Staff
First contact with aliens could end in colonization and genocide if we don’t learn from history
David Delgado Shorter, University of California, Los Angeles; Kim TallBear, University of Alberta, and William Lempert, Bowdoin College
We’re only halfway through 2023, and it feels already like the year of alien contact.
In February, President Joe Biden gave orders to shoot down three unidentified aerial phenomena – NASA’s title for UFOs. Then, the alleged leaked footage from a Navy pilot of a UFO, and then news of a whistleblower’s report on a possible U.S. government cover-up about UFO research. Most recently, an independent analysis published in June suggests that UFOs might have been collected by a clandestine agency of the U.S. government.
If any actual evidence of extraterrestrial life emerges, whether from whistleblower testimony or an admission of a cover-up, humans would face a historic paradigm shift.
As members of an Indigenous studies working group who were asked to lend our disciplinary expertise to a workshop affiliated with the Berkeley SETI Research Center, we have studied centuries of culture contacts and their outcomes from around the globe. Our collaborative preparations for the workshop drew from transdisciplinary research in Australia, New Zealand, Africa and across the Americas.
In its final form, our group statement illustrated the need for diverse perspectives on the ethics of listening for alien life and a broadening of what defines “intelligence” and “life.” Based on our findings, we consider first contact less as an event and more as a long process that has already begun.
Who’s in charge of first contact
The question of who is “in charge” of preparing for contact with alien life immediately comes to mind. The communities – and their interpretive lenses – most likely to engage in any contact scenario would be military, corporate and scientific.
By giving Americans the legal right to profit from space tourism and planetary resource extraction, the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015 could mean that corporations will be the first to find signs of extraterrestrial societies. Otherwise, while detecting unidentified aerial phenomena is usually a military matter, and NASA takes the lead on sending messages from Earth, most activities around extraterrestrial communications and evidence fall to a program called SETI, or the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
SETI is a collection of scientists with a variety of research endeavors, including Breakthrough Listen, which listens for “technosignatures,” or markers, like pollutants, of a designed technology.
SETI investigators are virtually always STEM – science, technology, engineering and math – scholars. Few in the social science and humanities fields have been afforded opportunities to contribute to concepts of and preparations for contact.
In a promising act of disciplinary inclusion, the Berkeley SETI Research Center in 2018 invited working groups – including our Indigenous studies working group – from outside STEM fields to craft perspective papers for SETI scientists to consider.
Ethics of listening
Neither Breakthough Listen nor SETI’s site features a current statement of ethics beyond a commitment to transparency. Our working group was not the first to raise this issue. And while the SETI Institute and certain research centers have included ethics in their event programming, it seems relevant to ask who NASA and SETI answer to, and what ethical guidelines they’re following for a potential first contact scenario.
SETI’s Post-Detection Hub – another rare exception to SETI’s STEM-centrism – seems the most likely to develop a range of contact scenarios. The possible circumstances imagined include finding ET artifacts, detecting signals from thousands of light years away, dealing with linguistic incompatibility, finding microbial organisms in space or on other planets, and biological contamination of either their or our species. Whether the U.S. government or heads of military would heed these scenarios is another matter.
SETI-affiliated scholars tend to reassure critics that the intentions of those listening for technosignatures are benevolent, since “what harm could come from simply listening?” The chair emeritus of SETI Research, Jill Tarter, defended listening because any ET civilization would perceive our listening techniques as immature or elementary.
But our working group drew upon the history of colonial contacts to show the dangers of thinking that whole civilizations are comparatively advanced or intelligent. For example, when Christopher Columbus and other European explorers came to the Americas, those relationships were shaped by the preconceived notion that the “Indians” were less advanced due to their lack of writing. This led to decades of Indigenous servitude in the Americas.
The working group statement also suggested that the act of listening is itself already within a “phase of contact.” Like colonialism itself, contact might best be thought of as a series of events that starts with planning, rather than a singular event. Seen this way, isn’t listening potentially without permission just another form of surveillance? To listen intently but indiscriminately seemed to our working group like a type of eavesdropping.
It seems contradictory that we begin our relations with aliens by listening in without their permission while actively working to stop other countries from listening to certain U.S. communications. If humans are initially perceived as disrespectful or careless, ET contact could more likely lead to their colonization of us.
Histories of contact
Throughout histories of Western colonization, even in those few cases when contactees were intended to be protected, contact has led to brutal violence, pandemics, enslavement and genocide.
James Cook’s 1768 voyage on the HMS Endeavor was initiated by the Royal Society. This prestigious British academic society charged him with calculating the solar distance between the Earth and the Sun by measuring the visible movement of Venus across the Sun from Tahiti. The society strictly forbade him from any colonial engagements.
Though he achieved his scientific goals, Cook also received orders from the Crown to map and claim as much territory as possible on the return voyage. Cook’s actions put into motion wide-scale colonization and Indigenous dispossession across Oceania, including the violent conquests of Australia and New Zealand.
The Royal Society gave Cook a “prime directive” of doing no harm and to only conduct research that would broadly benefit humanity. However, explorers are rarely independent from their funders, and their explorations reflect the political contexts of their time.
As scholars attuned to both research ethics and histories of colonialism, we wrote about Cook in our working group statement to showcase why SETI might want to explicitly disentangle their intentions from those of corporations, the military and the government.
Although separated by vast time and space, both Cook’s voyage and SETI share key qualities, including their appeal to celestial science in the service of all humanity. They also share a mismatch between their ethical protocols and the likely long-term impacts of their success. https://www.youtube.com/embed/5gZwLGrJQrM?wmode=transparent&start=0 This BBC video describes the modern ramifications of Captain James Cook’s colonial legacy in New Zealand.
The initial domino of a public ET message, or recovered bodies or ships, could initiate cascading events, including military actions, corporate resource mining and perhaps even geopolitical reorganizing. The history of imperialism and colonialism on Earth illustrates that not everyone benefits from colonization. No one can know for sure how engagement with extraterrestrials would go, though it’s better to consider cautionary tales from Earth’s own history sooner rather than later.
This article has been updated to correct the date of James Cook’s voyage.
David Delgado Shorter, Professor of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, University of California, Los Angeles; Kim TallBear, Professor of Native Studies, University of Alberta, and William Lempert, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Bowdoin College
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Science
Sonic booms from meteors can release the energy of hundreds of tons of TNT – here’s how they work
Shawn Laatsch, University of Maine
Sonic booms from meteors can release the energy of hundreds of tons of TNT – here’s how they work
As humans, we live out our lives on a planet that is constantly sweeping through a cosmic ocean littered with ancient debris from the formation of the solar system. For the most part, our world glides silently through space, shielded by Earth’s thin atmosphere.
Occasionally, however, the rest of the universe reminds us of its presence with stunning, visceral clarity.
Residents along the Massachusetts–New Hampshire border were startled by a sudden sonic boom on the afternoon of May 30, 2026. A large number of people up and down the Eastern Seaboard witnessed it.
After NASA analyzed imagery from weather satellites, they identified the culprit as a small meteor measuring roughly 3 to 5 feet (1 to 2 meters) across. It was screaming through space at an astonishing 42,000 miles per hour (68,000 kilometers per hour) when it plunged into Earth’s upper atmosphere.
Friction between the meteor and the increasingly dense air quickly turned the kinetic energy of the rock shooting through the sky into blistering heat. At an altitude of roughly 40 miles (60 kilometers), the immense heat and pressure overcame the structural integrity of the meteor, causing it to fragment in a brilliant flash.
The breakup released a staggering burst of energy equivalent to 300 tons of TNT. When an object travels through the air at speeds faster than sound, which is 761 mph (1,225 kph), it creates a shock wave creating a thunderous clap, or sonic boom. While the majority of the rock vaporized, the remaining fragments rained down harmlessly into the waters of Cape Cod Bay.
In the past, such an event might have passed as an unverified sighting in the daytime sky. Today, however, our planet is wired with an accidental network of planetary defense sensors: dashboard cameras, security systems and digital doorbells.
Because meteor entries like this one last only a few fleeting seconds, they were easily missed in the past. Now, our collective digital eyes capture these spontaneous cosmic intrusions almost instantly, bringing the universe directly into our daily news feeds. While dramatic, these events are more common than most people imagine.
As someone who has worked as a planetarium director and astronomy educator for over four decades, I often get emails, social media messages and phone calls about such objects and sightings. While hearing a sonic boom can be a bit unsettling or even shocking, it reminds us we live in an active universe and may want to occasionally look up instead of down at our devices.
A meteoric spring
The Cape Cod fireball was the latest sighting in an active season of meteoritic arrivals. Just months earlier, the solar system seemed to be sending a parade of rocky objects down to Earth.
From March 8-11, observers in Northern Europe witnessed large, slow-moving fireballs in their skies. Enthusiasts and scientists successfully recovered several fragments. Lab analysis of these specimens revealed their place in a fascinating lineage – scientists determined that they had originated from Vesta, a massive, pristine asteroid orbiting between Mars and Jupiter.
On March 17, a 7-ton asteroid measuring roughly 6 feet across entered the atmosphere directly over Lake Erie. Traveling at 45,000 mph (72,400 kph), it generated a brilliant daytime flash and a powerful sonic boom, unloading an energy equivalent to 250 tons of TNT. NASA scientists published data about its trajectory, allowing meteorite hunters to recover pristine fragments in Valley City, just a short drive from Cleveland, Ohio.
Only four days later, on March 21, another cosmic fragment blazed across the skies of Texas. This object was about 3 feet wide, and it traveled at 35,000 mph (56,300 kph), releasing the energy of roughly 26 tons of TNT.
Outside of Houston, homeowner Sherri James was startled by a sudden crash, only to discover a 6-inch (15-cm) hole in her roof and a small piece of the solar system resting on her floor.
Thank goodness for Earth’s atmospheric shield
The benchmark for modern atmospheric impacts is the Chelyabinsk meteor, which exploded over Russia on Feb. 15, 2013.
That object was significantly larger than any of the meteors researchers have observed in 2026, measuring 60 feet (18 m) across and weighing roughly 10,000 tons. When it shattered 18 miles (29 km) above the ground, it produced an airburst with an explosive force 30 times greater than the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
The resulting shock wave shattered glass across hundreds of square miles, injuring nearly 1,500 people and registering as a seismic event between 2.7 and 3.7 on the Richter scale. The incident was a stark reminder that while Earth’s atmosphere is an incredibly effective shield, absorbing the lion’s share of cosmic impacts, a large enough kinetic punch can still reach the surface below.
Despite the dramatic stories around these meteor impacts, history shows that the cosmic lottery rarely targets humans directly. In all of recorded history, there is only one universally confirmed case of a person being directly struck by a space rock.
In 1954, an 8.5-pound (3.8 kg) meteorite crashed through the roof of a house in Sylacauga, Alabama, ricocheted off a heavy wooden radio and struck a sleeping woman named Ann Hodges. Though it left a severe bruise on her hip, the radio absorbed the brunt of the impact. Had it not been for the radio, there is a chance she could have been seriously injured or killed by this object.
Living with the cosmos
So, are you in any imminent danger from meteors? The mathematics of the cosmos provide profound reassurance. The statistical odds of being struck by a meteorite are vanishingly small. You stand a better chance of winning a multimillion-dollar lottery jackpot 10 times in a row than ever being hit by a meteorite.
The vast majority of the tons of space debris that bombard Earth daily arrive as harmless dust grains, burning up as elegant meteors or shooting stars. But when the larger pieces do break through and land on our planet, they offer a rare, tangible connection to the beginning of the solar system.
If you ever happen to witness one of these magnificent fireballs ripping open the sky, consider reporting your observation to the American Meteor Society. The organization keeps track of sightings and falls from around the globe. Recovered fragments provide a way for scientists to gain valuable information about the origin of our solar system, and of our home planet.
Shawn Laatsch, Director of the Versant Power Astronomy Center, University of Maine
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Last Updated on June 12, 2026 by Rod Washington
Valerie Thomas is a true pioneer in the world of science and technology. A NASA engineer and physicist, she is best known for inventing the illusion transmitter, a groundbreaking device that creates 3D images using concave mirrors. This invention laid the foundation for modern 3D imaging and virtual reality technologies.
Beyond her inventions, Thomas broke barriers as an African American woman in STEM, mentoring countless young scientists and advocating for diversity in science and engineering. Her work at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center helped advance satellite technology and data visualization, making her contributions both innovative and enduring.
In our latest short video, we highlight Valerie Thomas’ remarkable journey—from her early passion for science to her groundbreaking work at NASA. Watch and be inspired by a true STEM pioneer whose legacy continues to shape the future of space and technology.
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Automotive
The Road to Cleaner Water: How to Prevent Roads from Polluting Waterways
Everyone loves driving on clean highways and spotless local roads. Few people, however, realize the benefits of clean roads go well beyond mere aesthetics. Cleaner roads also mean cleaner and healthier local rivers, lakes and beaches. Follow these simple year-round tips to help make the waters as fun and healthy as possible this summer.
(Feature Impact) Everyone loves driving on clean highways and spotless local roads. Few people, however, realize the benefits of clean roads go well beyond mere aesthetics. Cleaner roads also mean cleaner and healthier local rivers, lakes and beaches.
That’s because harmful pollutants in local waters often run off untreated from highways and roads during strong storms. Those rains sweep trash, dripped oil, harmful chemicals and even dangerous bacteria from pet waste into local waters via stormways and sewers. This untreated runoff can affect people’s health, make water unsafe for swimming and harm aquatic life. Every year, such man-made “stormwater pollution” even closes portions of recreational rivers and beaches.
It’s up to everyone to help prevent human-caused stormwater pollution. Don’t wait for rain in the forecast to get started. Instead, follow these simple year-round tips from the experts at the California Department of Transportation to help make the cooling waters in California and beyond as fun and healthy as possible this summer.
Trash-Free Trips and Responsible Car Care
Summer can mean more road time traveling to your next adventure. Loose items in truck beds and on roof carriers or trash tossed from car windows can quickly become the next wave of stormwater pollution flowing into local waters. To reduce:
- Secure Your Load: Always securely tarp and tie down anything in a truck bed or on a roof rack. Items falling off vehicles are both a safety hazard and can become roadside debris.
- Keep a Car Trash Catcher: Designate a bag or container in your car for food wrappers, coffee cups and other small trash until you can dispose of it properly.
- Wash Smart: Commercial car washes that recycle water are superior for preventing road dirt and chemicals accumulated on your car from entering storm drains compared to washing in a driveway. If washing at home, do it on your lawn or a permeable surface where the water naturally filters into the ground and not street gutters.
Outdoor Adventures That Leave Only Footprints
Whether you’re hiking a mountain trail, picnicking at the park or relaxing on the beach, remember the outdoor golden rule: pack out everything you pack in. Food wrappers, plastic bottles and even seemingly small items like bottle caps and cigarette butts are some of the most common litter found in parks, waterways and along coastlines. When left behind, they’re not just eyesores; they’re prime candidates for being washed into waterways.
- Pro Tip: Choose reusable water bottles that clip onto bags to reduce pollution from discarded plastic bottles.
At Home and In Your Neighborhood
Even close to home, your actions can make a difference.
- Garden Care: When tidying up your garden or front lawn, sweep leaves and grass clippings into your green bin instead of hosing them down the driveway. Hosing yard waste into road gutters can clog storm drains and cause flooding.
- Pesticide Prevention: To protect waterways from harmful chemical runoff, opt for organic or eco-friendly alternatives for pest and weed control whenever possible.
- Scoop the Poop: Pet waste contains harmful bacteria that can contaminate waterways. In fact, the EPA estimates that just two days’ worth of waste from 100 dogs can produce enough bacteria to close a beach. Always pick up after your pets, especially when walking in your neighborhood or parks, and dispose of it in a trash bin.
Pollution in waterways doesn’t just look bad; it creates real problems, from harming wildlife and ecosystems to causing potential health issues for humans and pets who encounter contaminated water. The cleaner roads and surrounding areas are, the healthier rivers, lakes and beaches become. For more tips and resources, visit CleanWaterCA.com to ensure a clean, healthy summer for everyone.
Photos courtesy of Shutterstock
SOURCE:
California Department of Transportation
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