It’s a simple question, dramatized in countless books and movies: How should human beings treat extraterrestrial aliens upon contact? Should we assume that they are hostile and attack? Should we “come in peace” like so many sci-fi heroes? Professor Michael Bohlander, Chair in Global Law and SETI Policy at the UK’s Durham Law School, takes this issue out of the realm of fiction and asks, for real, what will the law have to say about our interactions with ETs, and what legal rights will ETs have if they visit Earth?
In Contact With Extraterrestrial Intelligence and Human Law: The Applicability of Rules of War and Human Rights, Bohlander undertakes an ambitious and wide-ranging exploration of the many fascinating legal issues that arise when we contemplate an encounter with an extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI).
This may seem like a rather fanciful problem to deal with, but for me, co-author of a book on the risks of space piracy, it makes perfect sense. I empathize with Bohlander’s desire to think through the challenges today—not waiting for the moment of contact to scramble for answers.
Thorough and meticulously researched, Contact With Extraterrestrial Intelligence and Human Law starts by addressing what Bohlander rightly calls “The elephant in the room,” namely the endless (and arguably pointless) debate about the existence of UFOs and ETs. As someone engaged in the serious Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) initiative, Bohlander seems to chafe at the way academic scientists diligently avoid the topic of ETI for fear of looking like lunatics and ruining their careers.
The book then delves into the probability of ETI contact, using the Drake Equation to estimate the likelihood of ETIs existing in the Milky Way and beyond. Using the Drake formula, one could posit that there are over 50 exoplanets capable of supporting an ETI in our galaxy. He also investigates the Fermi Paradox, which asks, if ETI is common, why don’t we see evidence of it?
Bohlander’s answers, also well-sourced, start to highlight how complicated this problem is. Yes, there may be many ETIs, but they may represent civilizations that disappeared hundreds of thousands of years ago. Or, they maybe reached us, but we aren’t aware of it. There could be signals in galactic radio waves that we simply don’t see as messages, yet.
He discusses science fiction in detail, too, because, as he shares, SETI and thinking about ETI in general owe an outstanding debt to fiction. Creative artists can imagine scenarios that elude scientists and lawyers.
The book then gets down to the work of figuring out the legal parameters of an engagement between humanity and an ETI. This is where Bohlander’s background as an international criminal lawyer comes into play. His understandable first reference point in thinking about human-ETI legal issues is the world’s current international law framework, which deals with humanitarian and human rights law issues. The way we deal with alien civilizations on planet Earth is a good starting point for thinking about how we might deal with an ETI.
How well do we Earthlings deal with the rights of other countries? The truth is we aren’t very good at reconciling differing ideas of rights and justice even between our fellow human societies. This does not bode well for legal entanglements with an ETI. Bohlander is at least pointing these issues out for us to discuss now, in advance of a point of contact. Maybe we can make progress toward a more reasoned and equitable legal framework before it’s too late.
The second half of the book goes into detail on what it will take for Earth to “join the Galactic Club” and engage with ETIs using a legal framework that protects us as well as them. It is here that Bohlander raises an issue that is essential but also limiting: the legal, cultural, and moral assumptions that human beings make about themselves and non-humans.
We can’t help but think about ourselves on our own terms. We are a species with biological needs and fixed lifespans. We have ways of dealing with other humans, ranging from empathy to genocide, as well as a tendency to enslave, kill, and eat non-human species if we think it’s in our best interest to do so. As Bohlander points out, these assumptions affect how we think about the legal rights of non-humans, and we run the risk of projecting these same thoughts onto non-humans when we contemplate how they will regard our legal rights.
Assumptions about human behavior may be a logical trap we can’t escape if we want to develop a legal framework for dealing with ETIs. We simply cannot know how an ETI views us and their own legal rights, if indeed they even think about such things at all. The idea of justice and legal rights may be a uniquely human trait, borne from evolutionary biological factors that don’t exist on other planets.
The issues Bohlander raises, however, may have applicability in more near-term venues. For example, as artificial intelligence (AI) gets better at mimicking human intelligence, some legal experts have pointed out that AIs might need their own legal protections. This issue comes up in the book The Reasonable Robot, by Ryan Abbott, also a UK-based lawyer. Wondering if machines have human legal rights is a comparable exercise to the one that Bohlander has shared in his book. A lot of the same questions and assumptions about humanity come into play. In this way, Contact With Extraterrestrial Intelligence and Human Law is as much a journey into the nature of humanity as it is a discussion of ETIs’ legal rights.