What Do We Do If SETI Is Successful?

The Search For Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is evolving. We’ve moved on from the limited thinking of monitoring radio waves to checking for interstellar pushing lasers or even budding Dyson swarms around stars. To match our increased understanding of the ways we might find intelligence elsewhere in the galaxy, the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) is working through an update to its protocols for what researchers should do after a confirmed detection of intelligence outside of Earth. Their new suggestions are available in a pre-print paper on arXiv, but were also voted on at the 2025 International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Sydney, with potential full adoption early next year.

This updated protocol marks the largest change in the 36 years there has been a protocol. THe IAA first created a “Declaration of Principles” in 1989 that was intended to suggest how humanity should react to a confirmed signal from an alien world. This protocol was updated in 2010, but those changes were largely just streamlining with little substantive differences.

The update being put forth now, though, is significantly different in a number of important ways. It is intended to reflect the growing complexity of dealing with highly sensitive topics in the modern world, especially when dealing with social media. A big part of its intent is to protect the researchers who announce the discovery from online harassment, or worse.

But perhaps the most important single change is the suggestion of whether humanity should respond to a direct message. Previous versions of the protocol have suggested that yes, we should, and put few restrictions on doing so. The updated one suggests that the researchers should absolutely not send any reply until after the issue is discussed at the United Nations, which makes sense, though getting the UN itself to agree to anything at this point seems like a hard ask.

To be clear, as it is explicitly stated in the paper, this suggestion does not directly impact the idea of messaging extraterrestrial intelligence (METI), where we would proactively send high power signals ourselves to potentially promising nearby star systems. That idea is even more controversial than just passing scanning the skies for signals, or looking for other, unintentional “technosignatures”. While it should probably have its own governing protocol, the best we have done so far is a series of “position papers” from the IAA and other organizations addressing thoughts on what we should do, but which hasn’t been formally ratified into an accepted set of actions.

The actions in the new SETI protocol, though, are much more straightforward, though they too are to be thought of as “best practices” rather than hard and fast rules that bind anyone in the international order. They include methods for verifying the signal or collected data, as well as how and where to store the data (in two separate geographical locations and made accessible to more stakeholders), as well as the software used to analyze the data itself.

If the signal happens to be electromagnetic, which is what started the SETI search in the first place, the paper suggests petitioning the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the governing body of the world’s wireless channel distribution, to free up the bandwidth it was detected on. That would lessen any interference, intentional or otherwise, from manmade sources - or at least give legal recourse to stopping the interference.

Overall the message from the update is that the world has gotten much more complex in the last fifteen years - ranging from the political and social environment on Earth to our understanding of what a SETI discovery might look like. While no organization claims to have all the answers to what to do should we find a signal indicating alien intelligence, the way the IAA has been handling this update process, which has been ongoing with multiple rounds of revisions over the last two years, has been exemplary. The final step in its ratification, assuming it passed the simple majority vote in Sydney, is to have the IAA’s board ratify it, allowing the sub-committee that developed it to continue its underappreciated, but one day potentially vital, work.

Learn More:

M. A. Garrett et al - SETI Post-Detection Protocols: Progress Towards a New Version

UT - Setting Bounds On SETI

UT - Scientists are Planning for Life After Finding Aliens

UT - We Could Snoop on Extraterrestrial Communications Networks