If We Discover Alien Life, Will Humanity Keep Its Cool?

Today, the world is still grappling with a haunting question: Are we alone in this infinite universe, or is life infinitely diverse throughout the universe? To date, we are still alone, but discovering extraterrestrial life would tie a definitive bow on that existential question. In other words, it would be a major paradigm shift. So if we finally determine that we are indeed not alone, will the very fabric of society tear apart?In fact, humanity might embrace the news with open arms.

They started with a preliminary contextual analysis, measuring the reactions to news that extraterrestrial life might exist. They included five primary “discovery” events: the 1967 discovery of pulsars, the 1977 “Wow!” signal, the 1996 discovery of fossilized microbes on Mars, the 2015 discovery of Tabby’s star, and the 2017 discovery of exoplanets in the habitable zone of a star.

They then turned to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and asked 504 people to respond to a hypothetical situation: Imagine scientists just discovered microbial life outside of Earth. They were told to describe their reactions, as well as the reactions of other people. Again, people tended to be more positive. They repeated the experiment with a more concrete example: New York Times coverage of Bill Clinton’s 1996 announcement about Martian life, or Craig Venter’s 2010 announcement about synthetic life.

“It didn’t cause a radical shift in the way people lived their lives. It didn’t cause people to abandon anything,” Varnum says. “Human beings have been through pretty powerful paradigm shifts, from not being in the center of the universe to Darwin’s evolution. In the past, people would be afraid of them. But the notion that a discovery like this will destabilize anything, as it turns out, is kind of silly.

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