If aliens contact humanity, who decides what we do next?

Scientists setting up post-detection hub' in Scotland are concerned humans would react like headless chickens'

The moment has been imagined a thousand times. As astronomers comb the cosmos with their powerful telescopes, they spot something that makes them gasp. Amid the feeble rays from distant galaxies lies a weak but persistent signal: a message from an advanced civilisation.

It would be a transformative event for humankind, one the world's nations are surely prepared for. Or are they? Look at the mess we made when Covid hit. We'd be like headless chickens," says Dr John Elliott, a computational linguist at the University of St Andrews. We cannot afford to be ill-prepared, scientifically, socially, and politically rudderless, for an event that could happen at any time and which we cannot afford to mismanage."