I recently read a book about the defection of Viktor Belenko which occurred when he flew an important Soviet fighter to Japan - Defection of Viktor Belenko - Wikipedia
It got me wondering what would and should be humanities reaction if a similar event occurred, an alien lands somewhere on Earth and claims asylum from an oppressive and totalitarian government which he is fleeing. They subsequently make contact and demand both pilot and vessel back…or else.
Should we tell them to go swivel, or keep the pilot and return the ship or vice versa, give both back with alacrity?
The moral thing to do would be to keep the pilot but we don’t know how powerful and aggressive the aliens are.
How do we know he’s telling the truth? What if he’s actually a wanted alien multi-planet multi-species génocidaire? We have no way of telling, unless the other aliens outright say “He’s right, and…?”
We do know they’re powerful enough to have interstellar travel and communication, so … more powerful than us, I’d say (barring a Road Not Taken scenario). And the aggressive part is covered by your “…or else”.
We would be insane not to return pilot and ship. Suicidally so, I’d say.
There is absolutely no way we would ever tell an alien to “go back” without at least first thoroughly debriefing and examining him. An alien who landed on Earth - and could speak our language, to boot - would be the most monumental discovery in all of human science.
Sure, we’d have to weigh the risk of total Earth destruction, but at least we’d exhaustively photograph and scan everything that could be. The capabilities of the alien, and his space craft, would really clue us in on whether we must obey the new alien overlords, or can mount meaningful resistance.
I was in USAF a few years after Belenko defected. At that time he was employed by USAF as a speaker who presented a class on Soviet thinking to fighter pilots attending Red Flag. So I met the guy, albeit briefly. As did dozens of other people that morning.
USAF / DoD did have quite a process at the beginning to decide how much to trust this guy and his story. The MiG-25 was unequivocal evidence, while everything he said might have been BS or a Soviet ploy to embed a double-agent in USAF.
IIRC he was still utterly untrusted when I came by a decade later. Treated with respect, but at the same time as a “useful idiot”. But he had a comfortable living and a US lifetime pension, so he was happy enough it seemed. I later read his book which pretty well corroborates the mindset I saw on display that one afternoon. Both his and that of USAF.
As to the OP’s overall scenario, we’ve done this a time or twelve.
The First Contact, when, not if, it becomes public knowledge will rock our World even if an alien fleet never shows up to issue an ultimatum. The collective insanity engulfing the US today is nothing compared to what will happen when alien(s) are acknowledged to be here.
As to the ultimatum, we have no rational choice but to comply, while at the same time expecting to be incinerated, conquered, or interned / quarantined anyhow despite our compliance with all demands.
This is the practical equivalent of a SWAT team showing up at a little old lady’s house to arrest her. The least bad possible outcome for her is they get exactly what they want without too much collateral damage to her.
However an alien fleet up there making threatening noises will make humanity totally lose its collective shit.
As @puzzlegal so wisely points out just above, who is “we”? The Earth is not going to speak with one voice in this. Even if the human public wanted to coalesce around a single coherent decision (which they won’t), it would take far longer than the aliens are likely to wait for the Earth governments to get their collective shit together.
The OP wasn’t necessarily positing a fleet, just communication, by my reading. If they have an actual fleet of FTL ships in orbit, that moves the needle over to the “extremely suicidal” end of the Insane-O-Meter™.
“We” is whoever has and can retain actual possession of the alien/ship. They get to call the shots, whoever they end up being.
Imagine (oh, the irony) that it lands in Pyongyang!
Any civilization that has the capability to send a craft with one inhabitant aboard to Earth also has the capability to annihilate the entire human species. Our only option would be to immediately reply “Yes, of course, we’ll turn over the ship and pilot as soon as you come to collect them”.
There is a slim chance that, by the time they arrive to collect, we’ll have learned enough from the pilot and ship that we’ll be able to fight back. Wait and see on that one… but go in assuming that we won’t.
Not necessarily, although that would be the way to bet, yes.
Singular genius creators, or completely exorbitant expense of manufacture, or absurd energy requirements, or use of some transient phenomenon for FTL - all might serve to make the one craft we have actual experience of in reality singular, or very, very rare, and their threat of retaliation just an empty bluff. They may be after the only FTL their civilization has possessed to date.
Although their concurrent use of FTL comms would argue against that train of thought.
If they’re communicating with us in near real time they’re nearby. Like within light hours or light weeks at most.
Recognizing that them transmitting on “subspace radio” won’t do any good since we have no such receivers. They’re going to have to communicate with us in ways compatible with current Earth tech. The only way to avoid that earth tech is to either deliver an uninhabited probe carrying a message in Earth writing, or something like mass telepathy using tech we don’t understand. But which probably still isn’t FTL.
The only way to avoid them being in physical proximity and still communicating with us is for them to have some sort of FTL transport-whatsis. Which still leaves them in logical proximity.
Any civilization able to do those things is inherently very dangerous. Even if they have a Prime Directive they still have the capability for a General Order 24.
My real quibble with the OP’s scenario is them asking for the return of the pioneer & its ship.
If they’re nice guys guided by a Federation-like Prime Directive, they’d try to grab their pioneer back covertly, and failing in covertness they’d grab him anyhow and apologize for the inadvertent contamination of our civilization. Then vanish into the vastly deep.
If they’re not like that, I think it’d go a lot more like the last time I was picnicking and an ant got on my Oreo.
I ate the Oreo ant and all. The ant’s interests did not figure in my decision-making. Not even a smidgen. It was unworthy of my consideration.
The next ant got brushed off. But not out of any mercy, and I neither knew or cared whether it lived or died from my brush-off. It’s interests again did not matter; it was an obstacle to be removed with no further thought.
That’s how I’d expect a space-faring civilization to treat us & our planet.
Eh, it’s still possible that, for instance, the defector left in a slightly-slower-than-light vessel, and once they noticed that xe’d left, they figured out where xe was going, and sent a lightspeed radio signal after xem. In this scenario, we’d probably even receive the message before xe got here xemself. Or maybe after, if xe got enough of a head start before they noticed xe was missing. Or if their FTL ships are only slightly FTL.
Or maybe they have FTL comms, and they send the signal to the FTL radio in the defector’s ship. Which, of course, we’re monitoring.
Though their pursuit ships are probably of comparable speed to the defector’s ship, and they probably set out as soon as they noticed xe was missing, so that’d probably still only leave us however much time it took them to notice that xe’d gone, before they show up too. Best case, their pursuit ships are a bit slower than the defector’s, and so over however many lightyears they’re traveling over, they fall a few years behind.
Agree overall. That’s a narrow sliver of possibility, but about the only one that works. I also like your choice of “xe” as a pronoun. Makes me think of “xenomorph”.
The other quibble I have with the OP is the idea of a single alien in a single-inhabitant ship. Their tech is decidedly not our tech, and their biology is not ours either. But small vehicles (scaled for the inherent size of the alien beings) tend to limited capability, limited duration, limited range, vs larger vehicles.
If an alien shows up in a ship appropriately sized for one of xem, I’m going to bet that’s like a yacht’s tender, a warship’s boat, or an aircraft carrier’s fighter jet, and therefore something a lot bigger & more capable with a lot more of xem aboard is nearby. For appropriate scalings of “nearby” in distance and time.
Gonna be a bad day to be an Earthling almost no matter how it shakes out.
Well on something as important as this you’d like to think there’d be some sort of unified global response, but yes that’s probably naïve.
Yes, just a message received. Of course there may be a fleet close by.
I read a book by another defector who was taken on a road-trip with Belenko, I can’t recall his exact assessment of him but I believe he thought he was a bit of a lightweight. I do know I earmarked that page for future reference but I can’t recall at off-hand which book it was in.
Well it’s inspired by the Belenko scenario, so his home society is oppressive and restricted but not necessarily genocidal for the sake of it. Of course we only have the defectors word for that.
No need to use non-gender-specific pronouns, he’s identified himself as a male*. Interesting suggestions though!
*called Bob and an adherent to the Church of the Subgenius, now wouldn’t that set the cat among the pigeons! Joking of course.
