Earth Responds To First Contact With 40-Page Terms Of Service Agreement, Calls It A Strong Opening

PASADENA, CA — Eleven days after a radio signal from a star ninety-four light-years out resolved into the first confirmed greeting from another civilization, the newly formed Office of Exocomms Compliance replied on behalf of the planet with a forty-page terms of service agreement, which the visitors must accept and digitally countersign before any further conversation can take place.

The agreement, drafted over nine days by a rotating team of contract attorneys who had been told only that the client was "extraterrestrial and extremely patient," requires the alien signatories to waive the right to a jury trial, consent to binding arbitration in Delaware, and agree not to resell, broadcast, or NFT the handshake. A clause on page 31 obligates them to receive promotional transmissions "from time to time" and asks them to confirm, by checking a box rendered in their own symbolic language, that they are not a hostile swarm intelligence operating on behalf of a sanctioned regime.

"We wanted the first thing another species ever reads from us to really represent who we are," said Undersecretary for Exocomms Compliance Carla Yun, who oversaw the drafting and described the document as "a strong opening, legally speaking." Yun said the office considered a shorter greeting — a mathematical constant, a wave of welcome, anything — but ultimately decided that liability exposure "doesn't care how far away you live."

The visitors' reply arrived nineteen hours later and translated, roughly, to "we have forwarded this to our legal department," a phrase cosmolinguists at Caltech say maps almost exactly onto a stalling tactic used by a species that has had legal departments for considerably longer than humanity has had radio telescopes. A second, shorter transmission followed: a single repeated glyph that three independent translation teams now agree means, approximately, "seriously?"

A rider added Tuesday night expands the arbitration clause to cover "any dispute arising from the gift, loan, or forced reinterpretation of fire, language, or agriculture," which three legal scholars flagged as either boilerplate recycled from an old software license or, as one put it, "a tell that somebody in that office has read way too much science fiction and is taking no chances." The office denied this, noting only that the clause was "industry standard" without specifying which industry.

A Pew survey conducted the following morning found that 71 percent of Americans support the agreement, 19 percent oppose it, and the remaining 10 percent said they'd sign anything with a free trial attached. Local resident Gary Pelham, reached outside a Pasadena hardware store, said he hadn't read the full document but trusted that "if it worked for my gym, it'll work for the galaxy."

At press time, the aliens had reportedly entered a mandatory ninety-day cooling-off period required under their own consumer protection statutes, a wait Earth officials called "completely normal" and "nothing like the time we ignored a cancellation request for four years."