A brilliant young electromagnetics engineer fortuitously gets a research job at Green Bank Observatory, working on the country’s most powerful radio telescope. He notices a faint signal from a fixed point in space and through some out of the box thinking manages to decode it sufficiently to understand it is an artificial signal. When he tries to publish his findings to the scientific community, looking for validation of his conclusions, the entire security and law enforcement apparatus of the United States government seems to descend on him.
He quickly finds himself part of an elite international scientific team tasked with decoding the signal and understanding what might be happening. Long story short: aliens are making contact with humanity.
What follows is what might happen if in our world of today, aliens contacted us and were interested in exchanging information. No one country would be able to lead these efforts. It would take the entire international community, and the role of the United Nations might become more important.
AS1 speculates on what might happen if aliens suddenly were among us. As you may surmise, the bureaucratic inefficiency of the United Nations, the hype machine of the media, the insanity of cults, the insecurity of religions, all would cause an apocalyptic panic of the masses and would transform humanity. The world would never be quite the same again.
