{"id":18635,"date":"2018-02-17T00:23:40","date_gmt":"2018-02-16T16:23:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/what-if-scientists-find-signs-of-alien-life-experiment-suggests-we-wont-freak-out\/"},"modified":"2018-02-17T00:23:40","modified_gmt":"2018-02-16T16:23:40","slug":"what-if-scientists-find-signs-of-alien-life-experiment-suggests-we-wont-freak-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/what-if-scientists-find-signs-of-alien-life-experiment-suggests-we-wont-freak-out\/","title":{"rendered":"What if scientists find signs of alien life? Experiment suggests we won\u2019t freak out"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"TESS\"
An artist\u2019s conception shows the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, monitoring a distant star and its planets. (NASA Illustration)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

AUSTIN, Texas \u2014 If extraterrestrial life exists, there\u2019s a chance we\u2019ll detect it sometime in the next 20 years. And then what? A recently published study suggests that most folks will take the news calmly, if they care at all.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow would we react if we find that we\u2019re not alone in the universe? This question has been the cause of great speculation over the years \u2014 but, until now, virtually no systematic empirical research,\u201d Michael Varnum, a psychologist at Arizona State University, said today in Austin at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.<\/p>\n

In a study published by Frontiers of Psychology, Varnum and his colleagues suggest that revelations about life beyond our planet will be viewed more positively than negatively.<\/p>\n

That runs counter to the cautions contained in a series of studies put out during the 1950s and 1960s, implying that society couldn\u2019t handle the truth about aliens. Such studies fueled suspicions among conspiracy theorists that the world\u2019s governments were hiding evidence of alien life, purportedly for our own good. Those studies focused the potential impact of face-to-face encounters with intelligent extraterrestrials  \u2014 and continue to provide the sci-fi fodder for movies such as \u201cIndependence Day\u201d and TV shows such as \u201cThe X-Files.\u201d<\/p>\n

In contrast, the scenarios that Varnum\u2019s team considered were more realistic, and almost literally ripped from the headlines.<\/p>\n

Researchers analyzed the content of a variety of reports relating to potential discoveries of alien life, including articles from 1996 suggesting a Mars meteorite might contain fossilized nanobacteria; and more recent reports speculating that a faraway star might harbor an alien megastructure.<\/p>\n

The team also used Amazon\u2019s Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing service to recruit more than 500 experimental subjects, and asked them how they\u2019d respond to theoretical claims that signs of life had been found on a distant exoplanet. After their study was published, the researchers conducted an extra mini-analysis, looking at the text from eight news reports considering the possibility that an interstellar asteroid called \u2018Oumuamua was actually a visiting starship.<\/p>\n

A linguistic analysis of the news reports, as well as the experimental subjects\u2019 reactions to such reports, all leaned more toward the positive than the negative. The subjects responded more positively to reports hinting at the discovery of alien life than they did to reports about the creation of human-made synthetic life.<\/p>\n