A Disappointing First Contact

The ships will first be noticed only a few days before they arrive. The astronomers that will discover them will think they are just an undiscovered group of comets - at least at first. When they start to change their trajectories the astronomers will begin to realize they aren’t comets. By then it will be too late to do much of anything. The next day, the ships will have arrived. Ships as large as cities. Ships nearly identical to each other as if made on the same assembly line. There will be over a hundred ships that come. The ships won’t float over our cities or our military bases or our nuclear facilities. They will form a grid over our planet, spread from pole to pole. The ships will float above oceans, mountains, deserts, and forests. Only a few of them will be over populated areas more by happenstance than planning. 

The great superpowers of the world won’t know how to react. They all will hold off on any military options. Most countries will attempt to make contact, each country attempting on its own. Even some civilians will try to make contact through various radio towers. Contact attempts will be made from the ground, from airplanes, from satellites, and from the International Space Station. The Russians will even send up one of their space crafts into orbit to attempt to make contact. All will fail. 

This lack of communication will of course cause rampant speculation. Some will suggest the aliens do not use radio communication or that their radios are malfunctioning or that they are communicating and we just don’t know it. None of this speculation will be correct.

The human population will of course be shocked by this undeniable evidence of extraterrestrial life. There will be religious and social shocks to many. Even with such undeniable evidence as great space ships floating over the planet, there will be those that deny the evidence before their eyes.

The fleet will remain over our planet for three long days. After the third day the fleet will leave our planet but not our solar system. 

Before they leave, onboard one of the ships an alien will communicate with another. No human would be able to understand the words, but most would understand the message. The message will be something like this, “The benefit of establishing relations with this planet would be minimal. The creatures that inhabit it are extremely limited in their technology and the planet itself has little to offer in the way of valuable resources. There would be no benefit to making contact.”

“This was the only planet with a possibility of anything of value, we’ll leave this system at once,” the other alien will respond.

“Hold on, many of the asteroids in this system are rich in ores that would worth our time to mine.”

The astronomers will watch as the ships travel around the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter - except this time the rest of the planet will watch with them. The ships will bring in asteroids one by one, bringing in great riches. Another eight days later, the ships will leave our system behind. The ships will spend twice as much time mining asteroids than they spent investigating our planet.

And so, Earth’s first contact with intelligent life from beyond our little planet will be rather anti-climatic. The ships will come, and the ships will leave. They won’t come to conquer or to share their knowledge. They will come as prospectors and fortune hunters and they will find nothing of value on planet Earth. To the aliens aboard those ships, the lifeless asteroids of our solar system will be more valuable than all the riches of planet Earth.