First Contact: An Alien Encounter – Drama-documentary telling the gripping story of an encounter with an alien object travelling through the solar system. Many leading scientists believe there’s a genuine possibility that the first evidence of extra-terrestrial life may soon be detected. First Contact: An Alien Encounter offers up an exploration of what might happen in this unprecedented scenario.
Blending cutting-edge scientific fact with fictional podcasts, media feeds and international news programmes, this 21st-century War of the Worlds tells the dramatic story of an encounter with an alien object travelling through the solar system over the course of 12 days and explores how the world could respond.
First Contact: An Alien Encounter
First contact is a common science fiction theme about the first meeting between humans and extraterrestrial life, or of any sentient species’ first encounter with another one, given they are from different planets or natural satellites. The theme allows writers to explore such topics such as xenophobia, transcendentalism, and basic linguistics by adapting the anthropological topic of first contact to extraterrestrial cultures.
In anthropology, first contact is the first meeting of two communities previously without contact with one another. Notable examples of first contact are those between the Spanish Empire and the Arawak in 1492; and the Aboriginal Australians with Europeans in 1788 when the First Fleet arrived in Sydney.
Such contact is sometimes described as a “discovery”, such as the British and United States did by creating the legal theory of the “Doctrine of Discovery”. It is generally the more technologically complex society that is able to travel to new geographic regions to make contact with those more isolated, less technologically developed societies. However, some object to the application of such a word to human beings, which is why “first contact” is generally preferred. The use of the term “discovery” tends to occur more in reference to geography than cultures; for an example of a common discovery debate, see Discoverer of the Americas.
The fascination with first contact has gone through many transformations since the Age of Discovery, one of the earliest narratives being about contacting the Ten Lost Tribes and Prester John, and continues today as a trope in science fiction about extraterrestrial first contact, as well as being manifest in contemporary space exploration (for example the Pioneer plaque).
Establishing contact with uncontacted peoples is still attempted, despite the negative effects, history and opposition by indigenous peoples, advocacy groups and specialized institutions like FUNAI.
