Towards a Multinational Treaty: Preparing for First Contact and Interstellar Diplomacy

Is Anyone Planning for Diplomacy with an Extraterrestrial Civilization?

John Gertz argues that detecting an interstellar visitor would require a formal, international, and transparent diplomacy framework—potentially a UN COPUOS-guided treaty—that would establish a multinational body with data-sharing and inspections, address first-contact options such as destroying or capturing a probe or treating it as an ambassador, acknowledge our ignorance about ETIs, and lay out a 16-article starting draft for a Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in Humankind's Relations with Robotic or Biological Extraterrestrial Intelligence to promote unity and preparedness even if contact remains distant, while noting that SETI is expanding with facilities like FAST and the VLA and that contact could come via probes or AI-enabled dialogue.