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Does the ISS have any procedures in place for alien contact?
Unlikely as it is, what would they do if a non human vessel suddenly approached or if a little green man knocked on the door?
Unlikely as it is, what would they do if a non human vessel suddenly approached or if a little green man knocked on the door?
Kill the lights, draw the blinds, hide in the corner until they go away?
There is probably a formal plan in play, but I'd imagine that there would be far too much "holy shitting" going on to use it as more than a reference.
There are guns on the ISS! Technically, they're guns that are owned by the Russians, but they do shoot bullets nonetheless. Unfortunately, discharging a gun on the ISS is the space station equivalent to detonating nuclear weapons for warfare on Earth—and probably guarantees mutually assured destruction, thanks to the depressurisation problems that result from making a hole in your $100 billion orbiting laboratory.
I wouldn't be toooo sure about that. Depends of course on what you hit, but a bullet-sized hole in the pressure vessel isn't too bad. They've had holes before, you know. The station won't blow up, it'll just leak air. I think they've got a fair bit of spare pressurized air, and a bit of duck tape is a fairly good patch job.
That said, starting first contact with aliens with a shootout isn't a good idea, even if you can survive shooting your own gun. Any engine that brings sentient aliens in from interstellar space is strong enough to mess up your day, no purpose-built weapons needed. What is a rocket engine if not a plasma shotgun?
I guess I was imagining an actual conflict onboard. I don't see a single bullet being fired and that being the end of the situation—is what I mean. Individual bullet holes could be patched very easily, but if there's an all-out hostile situation aboard, a dozen or more bullet holes, some penetrating important componentry, such as the coolant loops (which use ammonia), or damaging critical infrastructure like the edge of a docking mechanism, then you're looking at serious issues.
Couple that with a presumable breakdown in communications, and I still think duct tape patch jobs won't help much.
Yeah, an ammonia coolant leak is real bad, and a breakdown of comms is going to make a repair almost impossible. I'm not sure how likely the latter scenario is and how easily a ammonia leak is to isolate, but those could be potential "abandon ship" scenarios.
The info on the soyuz survival gun I could find seems to indicate it's a manual-operation gun, so you'd probably have a hard time firing lots of shots with it in a stressful situation. It's meant to be used against wildlife. Has maybe also been replaces with a pistol, which would make poking lots of holes easier too.
It's an interesting scenario that hopefully never happens!
What happens on the ISS after a gun goes off sounds like a pretty good movie/short-story.
I suppose so but many astronauts are highly trained, experienced fighter pilots. I assume they’re able to follow protocol even if they’re scared shitless.
A protocol can be a piece of paper with a series of possible responses. No need to devote any sizable resources to make it.
I get that’s unlikely, but is it 100% impossible?
I can't check right now but there absolutely are official procedures (some classified, some not) in various administrations for first contact type events. For one thing, most of the operations that actively look for / attempt to reach out to alien life have developed such protocols (SETI / METI etc). I do believe NASA has one as well, I remember reading up on it. And yes, unlikely as it is, most governments will have such procedures documented somewhere; because if you thought Uber has too many engineers who do random shit to justify their job, wait until you find out about your government officials.
There's probably official procedures for far more unlikely shit. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised to hear about a nation that does have a documented contingency for meeting god.
Phone home, and transfer the call?
I just googled it and only found info for terrestrial contact.
An intelligent species might think it’s a good idea to approach an orbiting thing representing the entire humankind first.
It is possible for aliens to gather information about the ISS and it’s relative importance to us.
I mean, if we were approaching another civilization, we’d try monitoring their communications first.
That’s a Rick and Morty episode right there! :P
I dunno. To a spacefaring civilization, the most spacefary thing out there is probably an object of interest. It's much bigger than satellites and notably manned. They don't need to mess with our atmosphere or gravity or whatever, so it's closer to them than the surface would be. Seems as reasonable as going to the surface to establish contact, announce themselves via radio, or come in guns blazing.
According to this US astronaut, as of 2014, no such guidelines are taught in the US training program. Russia, et al, might be different, but I doubt it.
https://www.quora.com/Are-there-any-rules-or-procedures-issued-by-NASA-or-any-other-space-agency-for-the-eventuality-of-the-astronauts-meeting-aliens-or-UFOs
Personally, seems like an oversight to me. I wouldn't devote weeks of training to it, but having some kind of official protocol, just-in-case, seems prudent. They plan for every-damn-thing else.
It's hardly authoritative, but this site also touches on various interesting rules regarding space exploration.
https://listverse.com/2017/03/12/10-laws-rules-and-regulations-for-extraterrestrial-contact/
Besides that it would be basically too improbable to worry about, I don't think there's much we could do that would really matter. Any civilization that meets us is going to be much more advanced than us. For one thing, they must have developed interstellar space travel, but also, there's little reason to expect that their civilization is anywhere near as young as ours. We're a couple hundred years since the industrial revolution. It would be the world's biggest coincidence if they were also within hundreds or even thousands of years of the equivalent point in their history; they could be millions of years past that point! If they spent even a fraction of that improving and remaking themselves, then the difference between us could be like the difference between us and monkeys or ants. Whatever they want from the world might be utterly alien to us too; maybe if we're crazy lucky, they'd find us cute and harmless enough to let us keep going in a way we'd want to.
I really like the short story Three Worlds Collide and the book Blindsight for their examples of how different alien life could be and how disruptive meeting it could be.
Wow. Nice series of shorts! Thanks for pointing it out.
Spacecraft don't just suddenly approach other orbiting spacecraft. To be at the ISS you have to match it's orbit, which requires using your engines and is only even a little bit efficient if you do it at exactly the right times and let the gravity of whatever you're orbiting do most of the work of changing the direction you're moving.
So either they come in slowly, using their engines at the right points to set up an orbital rendezvous (and we see them coming), or they come in fast and hot, accelerating right at the thing half the time and decelerating the other half (and we see them coming).
Source: Played Kerbal Space Program
To be fair, we're dealing with an interstellar cruise here. The accelerate-for-half, decelerate-the-other-half approach only works if fuel is of no concern and your engines are comparatively weak. Orbital mechanics (and in general the expensiveness of matching orbits) does not apply to a craft that can travel light years. Say they've been on our doorstep all along, 20 LY away. Say 100 years is acceptable travel time. That's a velocity of 0.2c. So that's 60Mm/s (60,000km/s) dV on departure, and 60Mm/s dV on arrival. They don't care about the puny 12km/s or so orbital velocity of anything around earth.
To get back to the accelerate-all-the-way approach: For interstellar travel that doesn't really work too well. Engines are unlikely to be that weak, if you ask me. Consider that a accelerate-all-the-way craft needs X time to cover distance S. A craft with double the acceleration and the same amount of fuel (for the same final speed) needs half the time to reach top speed or slow down, and at top speed can coast for another such time period to cover the same distance. It took you 75% of the time to get there, and you only needed double the engines, not even double the fuel. In the limit case where your acceleration happens in an instant (or getting it done in a day or two before coasting for years, that works too), you're done in 50% of the time the constant-acceleration approach needs. We can safely ignore Einstein here, because as long as what you're interested in is the passage of time in the ship's reference frame, Einstein doesn't care.
Now, how much acceleration do you need? Let's use the numbers from earlier. 20LY, 100 years. That works out to 0.04m/s^2 of acceleration if you do constant-acceleration. That is very pedestrian. Current rockets have about a factor of 1000 more, if they need to cope with gravity. Your 100t-spacecraft coming for the ISS? 4kN of thrust needed. A merlin engine does 200 times that and weighs half a ton. I think it's very conceivable that even their longest-range engines would give a better acceleration than that, even if it means shutting them off part of the time.
Unless of course whatever engine tech they use is incredibly heavy already and the raw engine already has a rotten TWR.
Are they setting out from Alpha Centauri to hit the ISS specifically? Or are they deciding to go there after arriving somewhere in the system first?
Theoretically: Frankly, doesn't matter at that point. Given the dV calculation, any destination within the solar system is equally possible. And any interplanetary trip is cheap in comparison to an interstellar one. Even more so if they're arriving from further away.
Practically: ISS should be hard to detect from interstellar space. So the likelier outcome is that they detect life on earth and decide to stop by. On the way in, they detect the ISS. Since it's easier reached than earth (no reentry, no potentially toxic/corrosive atmosphere, no gravity), they decide to stop by there first.
Sure. And it’s not inconceivable for all of those things to be trivial for an alien spacecraft.
this is such an excellent question. The ISS actually has NASA's latest tech space weaponry, handheld Meson Blasters, and particle rifle cannons, as well as Arcblades. All excellent for the kind of combat you can encounter in case of enemy/alien incursions. All this tech is also being installed into SpaceX's vehicles.