Now that Arrival is in movie theaters, there’s a brief but interesting discussion with Seth Shostak at Space.com about likely consequences if aliens were to appear for real:

1. There would be no mass hysteria.

This has been a favourite among UFO conspiracy nutters forever. My personal view is that there would be a brief period of intense media interest and the usual online babbling – and then everything would go back to normal exactly the way it was before. Unless aliens were to actually land, in which case people might sustain interest a little bit longer, until the next cat video or celebrity breakup. Hostile Aliens are obviously a different matter, but in that case we’re screwed anyway.

2. The world would not unite in the face of a common threat.

Well, duh. Just look at our track record so far. Let’s take an obvious example and imagine that hostile aliens were to attack the United States. Does anyone really think that this would be anything other than a cause for joyful celebration for, say, Muslim extremists (and leftist radicals)? Tribal hatreds and ideological boundaries always override everything else, one only needs to study a little bit of human history to know that.

But it doesn’t matter. Aliens advanced enough to get here in the first place would obviously be so far ahead of us technologically that there’s nothing we could do to stop them, as has been pointed out numerous times. Uploading a computer virus into the mothership won’t really cut it.

(Unless the alien overlords are similar to our own leaders in competence – in that case they would probably bungle the invasion so utterly that we could attack their spaceships with pop rockets and still win).

3. No one knows if there are any protocols in place for dealing with alien visitors – and if there are, no one would follow them anyway.

This is not counting things like Seven Steps to Contact or the Post-Detection SETI Protocol, which deal with us finding alien life, not aliens finding us.

Of course the Pentagon probably has plans for what to do in case of alien invasion – and anyone wanting to read more about that, on a bunch of crazy UFO tinfoil hat sites (so I don’t recommend it), can google “Paul Springer” and “alien invasion.” Or read this book.