First-Contact Etiquette: A Field Guide

Nobody's made contact on one of our trips yet. The protocol is ready regardless, and so should you be.

We brief first-contact protocol on every Proxima Centauri b departure, and travelers occasionally ask why we bother when, as far as the official record shows, it's never come up. My answer is always the same: that's exactly why we bother.

Rule one is patience. If an encounter happens, it will not happen on your schedule, and it will not happen the way you rehearsed it in your head on the flight out. Slow movements, open hands, and let the moment be longer than feels comfortable.

Rule two is deference to the protocol lead, not to your own instincts, however sound they feel in the moment. Skinner has read the full document aloud to every departure group personally, and there's a reason it isn't a summary.

Rule three: document everything you're permitted to document, and nothing else. Recording equipment restrictions exist for reasons that have nothing to do with hiding anything from you and everything to do with a protocol written by people who've thought about this longer than any of us.

Rule four, and the one I actually believe matters most: go in curious, not afraid. Every account of a close encounter that's gone well, going back decades, shares that one trait. The ones that didn't go well didn't.