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First Contact Team

162 statements
29 feature instances
12 referencing feature instances

First Contact Team	type	FeatureClass
First Contact Team	label	First Contact Team
First Contact Team	page	FirstContactTeam
First Contact Team	comment	Whenever there's some kind of alien artifact found, or an extraterrestrial ship spotted in space, the government will always have some kind of official plan for dealing with First Contact. This trope is for when there is a "team" assembled, usually consisting of scientists, mathematicians, cunning linguists, and often a few oddball specialties. The reasoning is that, because nobody knows how the heck to talk with the aliens or how to interact with them, you'll want a team with a wealth of knowledge to draw on in order to ease the First Contact. For example, if you can't understand the Aliens language, you might have your mathematician demonstrate a little First-Contact Math. Or, if the aliens' behavior is bizarre and incomprehensible, you might have an anthropologist on the team to help discern their meaning.
First Contact Team	fetched	2023-11-14T19:46:42Z
First Contact Team	parsed	2023-11-14T19:46:42Z
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First Contact Team	processingUnknown	TheDig1995
First Contact Team	isPartOf	DBTropes
First Contact Team / int_1af5d573	type	First Contact Team
First Contact Team / int_1af5d573	comment	In Contact, an international team is assembled in order to make contact with the aliens who sent the signal.
First Contact Team / int_1af5d573	featureApplicability	1.0
First Contact Team / int_1af5d573	featureConfidence	1.0
Contact	hasFeature	First Contact Team / int_1af5d573
First Contact Team / int_234b21a7	type	First Contact Team
First Contact Team / int_234b21a7	comment	In The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), when they can't do a world leader group meeting with Klaatu, due to everyone's squabbling, they send in the best people from a number of different fields for the big formal meeting with him.
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First Contact Team / int_234b21a7	featureConfidence	1.0
The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)	hasFeature	First Contact Team / int_234b21a7
First Contact Team / int_2ba3e3b9	type	First Contact Team
First Contact Team / int_2ba3e3b9	comment	In Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey, the expedition into the Schwarzwelt consists of both scientists and soldiers. It's not initially conceived of as a First Contact Team, but they end up making contact with intelligent life within the Schwarzwelt, and their varied skills help see the mission through to completion.
First Contact Team / int_2ba3e3b9	featureApplicability	1.0
First Contact Team / int_2ba3e3b9	featureConfidence	1.0
Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey (Video Game)	hasFeature	First Contact Team / int_2ba3e3b9
First Contact Team / int_31759f24	type	First Contact Team
First Contact Team / int_31759f24	comment	The pilot episode of Threshold starts with one of these being organized.
First Contact Team / int_31759f24	featureApplicability	1.0
First Contact Team / int_31759f24	featureConfidence	1.0
Threshold	hasFeature	First Contact Team / int_31759f24
First Contact Team / int_342c4c18	type	First Contact Team
First Contact Team / int_342c4c18	comment	In the Modesty Blaise storyline "Take Me to Your Leader", a respected scientist and government advisor encounters what he believes is a first contact situation, and Sir Gerald Tarrant is given the job of selecting a small discreet first contact team. Modesty Blaise and Willie Garvin are his first and only choices; their ability to sniff out a scam is an obvious qualification, but Tarrant suggests that he would have picked them even if he didn't suspect a hoax — of all the people he knows, they have the broadest range of interests, solid grounding in the basics of many disciplines, and open and enquiring minds, which he considers more likely to be useful than any number of experts whose expertise might be about to be proven useless.
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First Contact Team / int_342c4c18	featureConfidence	1.0
Modesty Blaise (Comic Strip)	hasFeature	First Contact Team / int_342c4c18
First Contact Team / int_3a1209bd	type	First Contact Team
First Contact Team / int_3a1209bd	comment	The Journal Entries: White's Teams, which are often based on White's Ships, named for White's Theorem: "A space-faring species' first encounter with another space-faring species is most likely to be a distress signal." This occurs multiple times both on-screen and in backstories.
First Contact Team / int_3a1209bd	featureApplicability	1.0
First Contact Team / int_3a1209bd	featureConfidence	1.0
The Journal Entries	hasFeature	First Contact Team / int_3a1209bd
First Contact Team / int_45d9931e	type	First Contact Team
First Contact Team / int_45d9931e	comment	Subverted in Cosmic Sin. The team assembled within minutes of receiving word via Subspace Ansible of a hostile First Contact is actually an illegal military strike force with a Doomsday Device, the belief being that humanity really can't afford to give the aliens the benefit of the doubt when facing a Technologically Advanced Foe.
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First Contact Team / int_45d9931e	featureConfidence	1.0
Cosmic Sin	hasFeature	First Contact Team / int_45d9931e
First Contact Team / int_4a36fed5	type	First Contact Team
First Contact Team / int_4a36fed5	comment	The intro to Sid Meier's Starships has the colony assemble one after receiving a signal from another colony, the first word they've had from other humans in a thousand years. However, the signal is later determined to be a distress call, resulting in the civilian team being replaced by a fleet of well-armed warships.
First Contact Team / int_4a36fed5	featureApplicability	1.0
First Contact Team / int_4a36fed5	featureConfidence	1.0
Sid Meier's Starships (Video Game)	hasFeature	First Contact Team / int_4a36fed5
First Contact Team / int_4a485518	type	First Contact Team
First Contact Team / int_4a485518	comment	Invasion: Earth opens with an alien spacecraft crashlanding in New York City (barely missing the World Trade Center). A general steps out of a helicopter and announces that he's taking charge of the situation... and is arrested by the police captain who's actually in charge. The next military man to show up is the protagonist, an Air Force Intelligence officer who respectfully offers the captain some intelligence and practical advice (which is taken), then waits quietly while a team of scientists and military brass dispatched by the President argue. When it's time to enter the craft, he takes a Sergeant Rock with a .45 as protection, and an electronics specialist with a cable-fed camera (the cable guarded by its own team of soldiers).
First Contact Team / int_4a485518	featureApplicability	1.0
First Contact Team / int_4a485518	featureConfidence	1.0
Invasion: Earth	hasFeature	First Contact Team / int_4a485518
First Contact Team / int_587691ac	type	First Contact Team
First Contact Team / int_587691ac	comment	Noah from Clade is part of a team of researchers scanning the sky for any sign of alien communication. They actually do receive a burst of noise from a star which, when slowed down, shows patterns that mean it's almost certainly a language of some kind. Unfortunately, they have no way of deciphering the language, and because the star is 500 light-years away, they have no way of establishing communication with the senders, either.
First Contact Team / int_587691ac	featureApplicability	1.0
First Contact Team / int_587691ac	featureConfidence	1.0
Clade	hasFeature	First Contact Team / int_587691ac
First Contact Team / int_5aae76b1	type	First Contact Team
First Contact Team / int_5aae76b1	comment	In The Voyage of the Space Beagle, the eponymous ship is staffed with a wide selection of specialists, including a Nexialist, a scientist who specializes in the general use and assimilation of knowledge.
First Contact Team / int_5aae76b1	featureApplicability	1.0
First Contact Team / int_5aae76b1	featureConfidence	1.0
The Voyage of the Space Beagle	hasFeature	First Contact Team / int_5aae76b1
First Contact Team / int_605dd875	type	First Contact Team
First Contact Team / int_605dd875	comment	Stargate-verse: The main team of Stargate SG-1 are a pretty balanced collection who take up a number of roles: a military officer with sufficient authority to represent the United States to foreign powers, a physicist who can perform preliminary analysis of alien technology encountered, an anthropologist and linguist who can help with establishing friendly relations with any cultures they encounter, and an alien defector knowledgeable about the greater galaxy that Earth is stepping into. Also somewhat present in the Stargate movie. Parodied in the Stargate SG-1 episode "Cure" when a delegation of Human Aliens is awaiting the arrival of Tau'ri representatives. They talk about what they've heard about the representatives' leader, painting him as a brilliant negotiator. Then out of the gate comes O'Neill. Similar to SG-1, the team in Stargate Atlantis is frequently sent out on first contact missions, though they eschew an anthropologist in favor of a "native guide" in the form of Teyla. They later add another "native" in the form of Ronon, although he also doubles as The Big Guy, just like Teal'c in SG-1.
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First Contact Team / int_605dd875	featureConfidence	1.0
Stargate-verse (Franchise)	hasFeature	First Contact Team / int_605dd875
First Contact Team / int_627ec0c0	type	First Contact Team
First Contact Team / int_627ec0c0	comment	Played with in The Next Frontier; the Kerbals can't send a full team of anthropologists, linguists and so on along on their first interstellar mission because the ship just isn't big enough, but thanks to the FTL communications system they have the anthropology and linguistics departments of every university on Kerbin and Duna for Mission Control. The actual in-person contact team are three veteran astronauts, one engineer who helped create the Alcubierre Drive and one skilled Communications Officer who's supposed to scan for radio and TV signals so they can start picking up the language if they do find some aliens.
First Contact Team / int_627ec0c0	featureApplicability	1.0
First Contact Team / int_627ec0c0	featureConfidence	1.0
The Next Frontier / Fan Fic	hasFeature	First Contact Team / int_627ec0c0
First Contact Team / int_62aa95a6	type	First Contact Team
First Contact Team / int_62aa95a6	comment	In The Lost Fleet, the fleet is sent into alien space with xenologists who had attempted to work out how to contact aliens if they ever found them. They turn out to be much less useful than a general-turned-politician who had been sent along as an official ambassador, and who had many fewer preconceived notions.
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The Lost Fleet	hasFeature	First Contact Team / int_62aa95a6
First Contact Team / int_6e012371	type	First Contact Team
First Contact Team / int_6e012371	comment	In the Xandri Corelel series, the protagonist works on the starship Carpathia as the head of Xeno-Liaisons. She and her four team members work to learn how newly discovered species communicate, both verbally and nonverbally, in order to bring their planets into the Starsystems Alliance.
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Xandri Corelel	hasFeature	First Contact Team / int_6e012371
First Contact Team / int_70814599	type	First Contact Team
First Contact Team / int_70814599	comment	Parodied in the Stargate SG-1 episode "Cure" when a delegation of Human Aliens is awaiting the arrival of Tau'ri representatives. They talk about what they've heard about the representatives' leader, painting him as a brilliant negotiator. Then out of the gate comes O'Neill.
First Contact Team / int_70814599	featureApplicability	1.0
First Contact Team / int_70814599	featureConfidence	1.0
Stargate SG-1	hasFeature	First Contact Team / int_70814599
First Contact Team / int_760ce135	type	First Contact Team
First Contact Team / int_760ce135	comment	In Blindsight, the crew of the Theseus consists of highly specialized individuals specially assembled to be able to initiate First Contact, all of which have something unusual about them: Susan James, the linguist, has had her brain altered to facilitate the development of four different personalities; Isaac Szpindel, the biologist, has nerves which have been repurposed to allow him to see x-rays and taste ultra-sound; Major Amanda Bates is a military specialist whose defining career moment consisted of an act of treason in order to facilitate a peaceful outcome; Jukka Sarasti, technically the head of the team, is a genetically re-engineered vampire whose intellectual capabilities and foresight surpass those of any given human; and a synthesist, Siri Keeton, whose job it is to translate complex statements and/or data into more easily palatable language. Each of the crew also have potential replacements kept in hibernation until needed, though only Szpindel's backup, Cunningham, is awakened before things go completely wrong.
First Contact Team / int_760ce135	featureApplicability	1.0
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Blindsight	hasFeature	First Contact Team / int_760ce135
First Contact Team / int_7668653a	type	First Contact Team
First Contact Team / int_7668653a	comment	First Contact Teams are mentioned in passing in Mass Effect 2 as envoys from Council space to any newly discovered species. In this instance, the species in question was the yahg, and the incident got the yahg blacklisted and their world blockaded.
First Contact Team / int_7668653a	featureApplicability	1.0
First Contact Team / int_7668653a	featureConfidence	1.0
Mass Effect 2 (Video Game)	hasFeature	First Contact Team / int_7668653a
First Contact Team / int_78f6a3f	type	First Contact Team
First Contact Team / int_78f6a3f	comment	Played with in Close Encounters of the Third Kind: the aliens are recruiting a First Contact Team from the humans via subliminal communication. The government has its own team ready, but the only human the aliens will deal with is Roy Neary, who is the only one of the alien-recruited humans to actually make it all the way to the contact site.
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First Contact Team / int_78f6a3f	featureConfidence	1.0
Close Encounters of the Third Kind	hasFeature	First Contact Team / int_78f6a3f
First Contact Team / int_7988cb68	type	First Contact Team
First Contact Team / int_7988cb68	comment	Mass Effect: First Contact Teams are mentioned in passing in Mass Effect 2 as envoys from Council space to any newly discovered species. In this instance, the species in question was the yahg, and the incident got the yahg blacklisted and their world blockaded. Humanity never had the benefit of First Contact Teams, as we had expanded far space and ended up meeting the Citadel species by accident. Specifically, the turians, who caught humans illegally reactivating mass effect relays, and assumed we were pirates. The ensuing war was brutal and brief, and made more bitter by a number of misunderstandings which nearly escalated the situation into a galactic crisis. The other Citadel species caught wind of the situation, stepped in and brokered a cease fire, paving the way for humanity to join the Citadel. The incident was a point of contention between humans and turians for years after. In Mass Effect: Andromeda, Pathfinder teams are specifically trained to handle first contact, among other things. Ryder has to put this to use when the Tempest makes an emergency landing on the angara world of Aya. It's only afterward that the diplomats, xenoanthropologists, and sociologists are brought out.
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First Contact Team / int_7988cb68	featureConfidence	1.0
Mass Effect (Franchise)	hasFeature	First Contact Team / int_7988cb68
First Contact Team / int_81692f99	type	First Contact Team
First Contact Team / int_81692f99	comment	Any Star Trek episode that revolves around first contact, from any series, often has this with the away team, although they avert it almost as much.
First Contact Team / int_81692f99	featureApplicability	1.0
First Contact Team / int_81692f99	featureConfidence	1.0
Star Trek (Franchise)	hasFeature	First Contact Team / int_81692f99
First Contact Team / int_bcadd7cb	type	First Contact Team
First Contact Team / int_bcadd7cb	comment	Warhammer 40,000: First contact is usually a minor event to the galaxy at large, since most species couldn't hope to match the power players in the galaxy. For the Imperium, First Contact is usually done by Rogue Traders or the Adeptus Mechanicus. If the alien species proves useful, they'll be allowed to survive, for a time. If not, or if first contact is made by a militant body, the Imperium will wipe away the alien species soon afterwards. The Tau have the friendliest First Contact policy, trying to negotiate with minor species and try to bring them into their stable of client species. Some species simply prove too aggressive and have been exterminated as a matter of pragmatism. Most species to make first contact with the other major galactic powers will find themselves killed, and maybe eaten afterwards. The major exception is the Craftworld Eldar, with historical precedent suggesting that they prefer to remain unseen and would ignore most species unless they can prove useful. Eldar have regarded some individual humans in a manner that's arrogant, but helpful, and might generously be called friendly, so they might consider new species in a similar manner.
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First Contact Team / int_bcadd7cb	featureConfidence	1.0
Warhammer 40,000 (Tabletop Game)	hasFeature	First Contact Team / int_bcadd7cb
First Contact Team / int_c372d504	type	First Contact Team
First Contact Team / int_c372d504	comment	In the Priscilla Hutchins novel Chindi, the First Contact Society are wealthy UFO-chasers who are generally regarded as kooks but are indulged because they help raise funds for the Academy. When they fund a private expedition to investigate an alien transmission, no-one expects they'll find anything, but the Academy sends Hutch as The Captain to babysit them. Unfortunately, several of them end up getting killed when they make First Contact for real, as they lack the caution of professionals.
First Contact Team / int_c372d504	featureApplicability	1.0
First Contact Team / int_c372d504	featureConfidence	1.0
Priscilla Hutchins	hasFeature	First Contact Team / int_c372d504
First Contact Team / int_c487221e	type	First Contact Team
First Contact Team / int_c487221e	comment	According to Agent Kay in Men in Black, first contact with aliens was made in 1961, with 9 humans present: "7 agents, 1 astronomer, and 1 kid who got lost on the wrong backroad", who was, in fact, Kay himself.
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Men in Black	hasFeature	First Contact Team / int_c487221e
First Contact Team / int_c8a8bd94	type	First Contact Team
First Contact Team / int_c8a8bd94	comment	Mass Effect: Clash of Civilizations has a meeting between two of them, one comprised of Liara, Tali, Saren, Mordin, and a few others and the other being the crew of UNSC Hades Gate.
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Mass Effect: Clash of Civilizations (Fanfic)	hasFeature	First Contact Team / int_c8a8bd94
First Contact Team / int_d1e4c01a	type	First Contact Team
First Contact Team / int_d1e4c01a	comment	In Sphere, when an alien ship is discovered at the bottom of the ocean, the government sends a team composed of a psychologist, a mathematician, a biologist, and an astrophysicist. Later becomes a subversion: the psychologist who wrote the "Emergency First Contact Plan" admits that, after having been approached by the government to produce the plan, he thought it was so ridiculous that he lazily based all his recommendations on popular science fiction.
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First Contact Team / int_d1e4c01a	featureConfidence	1.0
Sphere	hasFeature	First Contact Team / int_d1e4c01a
First Contact Team / int_df870b3f	type	First Contact Team
First Contact Team / int_df870b3f	comment	In Arrival, twelve spaceships land all across the world with each one being assigned a team of different experts. The two main characters are a language expert and a theoretical physicist who initially trade barbs over their respective scientific fields.
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Arrival	hasFeature	First Contact Team / int_df870b3f
First Contact Team / int_e4732abc	type	First Contact Team
First Contact Team / int_e4732abc	comment	Similar to SG-1, the team in Stargate Atlantis is frequently sent out on first contact missions, though they eschew an anthropologist in favor of a "native guide" in the form of Teyla. They later add another "native" in the form of Ronon, although he also doubles as The Big Guy, just like Teal'c in SG-1.
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Stargate Atlantis	hasFeature	First Contact Team / int_e4732abc
First Contact Team / int_eb3f3551	type	First Contact Team
First Contact Team / int_eb3f3551	comment	In Mass Effect: Andromeda, Pathfinder teams are specifically trained to handle first contact, among other things. Ryder has to put this to use when the Tempest makes an emergency landing on the angara world of Aya. It's only afterward that the diplomats, xenoanthropologists, and sociologists are brought out.
First Contact Team / int_eb3f3551	featureApplicability	1.0
First Contact Team / int_eb3f3551	featureConfidence	1.0
Mass Effect: Andromeda (Video Game)	hasFeature	First Contact Team / int_eb3f3551

The following is a list of statements referring to the current page from other pages.

First Contact Team	processingCategory2	Alien Tropes
First Contact Team	processingCategory2	Speculative Fiction Tropes
Modesty Blaise (Comic Strip) / int_d20e79b2	type	First Contact Team
Heroes And Allies / Fan Fic	seeAlso	First Contact Team
Close Encounters of the Third Kind / int_d20e79b2	type	First Contact Team
Cosmic Sin / int_d20e79b2	type	First Contact Team
The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) / int_d20e79b2	type	First Contact Team
Clade / int_d20e79b2	type	First Contact Team
Constellation Games / int_d20e79b2	type	First Contact Team
Halfway Human / int_d20e79b2	type	First Contact Team
Musketeer Space / int_d20e79b2	type	First Contact Team
Sphere / int_d20e79b2	type	First Contact Team

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