Herschel was also applying the best scientific instruments he could at the time. All the way into the 20 th century, prior to the data obtained by the Mariner 4 flyby in , the possibility that Mars had a more clement surface environment, and therefore life, still carried significant weight.
In particular, the photometrically observed waves of darkening which proceed from the vaporizing polar caps through the dark areas of the Martian surface have been interpreted in terms of seasonal biological activity. Suffice to say, this proposal went the way of many other overly optimistic ideas about finding life on the red planet. Although it is fascinating how well the periodic darkening phenomenon they discussed could indeed fit into a picture of a surface biosphere on Mars — and remains perhaps a rather sobering lesson in overinterpreting limited data.
But the key point is that we have actually more often than not been of a mindset that life is out there, and could explain certain cosmic observations. The problem has been that, as data has improved, and scrutiny has intensified, the presence of life has not revealed itself — from planetary exploration or from the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Of course, we have also likely systematically underestimated the challenge across the centuries.
In that sense, perhaps the more fundamental question is whether or not we are, this time, technologically equipped to crack the puzzle once and for all. There is little doubt that our capacity to sense the most ethereal, fleeting phenomena in the cosmos is at an all time high. That said the two methods despite having little shared variance largely tell a similar story in present studies.
It is also noteworthy that we did not observe much variation in responses as a function of personality traits, disease avoidance, political orientation, or demographic factors such as income or ethnicity. One potential interpretation is that there may be a fair amount of homogeneity in reactions to extraterrestrial life, and that the findings of the current study may be broadly generalizable.
However, it is worth noting that our samples were restricted to United States respondents, and, given the fact that Americans differ from many other populations on a slew of psychological tendencies Henrich et al. Thus, we hope to eventually replicate this work cross-culturally in order to assess the degree to which our findings generalize and to explore the possibility that how people react to extraterrestrial life may vary as a function of cultural differences i.
Future studies could also explore whether reactions can be predicted by other individual difference measures related to attitudes toward science in general, such as attitude toward paranormal beliefs or conspiracy mentality. Additionally, religiousness, or particular religious beliefs, may affect how people respond to the discovery of extraterrestrial life. We did not assess these traits in the present work, although we think it may be informative to do so in the future as these may potentially provide boundary conditions for the effects observed in the present research.
This may reflect illusory superiority Brown, , although why positive reactions to alien life would be seen as a desirable trait is a question for future research. However, this discrepancy might in part reflect why some past speculation regarding societal reactions to this type of discovery have been fairly pessimistic.
However, it is worth noting that the difference in positivity bias did not reflect a difference in the overall direction of the bias, merely its strength. In addition, we focused our work on reactions to microbial life, but it may well be that the discovery of intelligent extraterrestrial life might lead to very different types of reactions, as intelligent beings provide different threats and opportunities than microbes.
To what extent results might be similar or different is an empirical question, albeit one which may be somewhat difficult to test short of an extremely convincing and immersive psycho-drama in which access to outside information is severely curtailed. Such work would present many challenges, especially in the context of an online study or a laboratory experiment. In addition, given that the likelihood of our species making contact with, or finding convincing proof of, intelligent extraterrestrial life is far smaller than the likelihood that we encounter evidence of current or extinct extraterrestrial microbial life, it may be wiser to focus our resources on preparing for the potential societal ramifications of the latter.
That said, recent polls suggest the majority of Americans, British, and Germans believe that some form of extraterrestrial life exists, and large percentages of Americans believe that not only does intelligent extraterrestrial life exist, but also that it has already visited us Main, And yet, in none of these societies have we seen an utter breakdown in social order or panic as a result of these widespread beliefs.
In the Pilot Study, we examined whether reactions in the articles differ for the three events covered, as each event may be linked to different forms of extraterrestrial life with varying degrees of complexity and intelligence. While we found no differences across the events in the proportions of words reflecting positive or negative affect, we did find that the articles about the discovery of Earth-like exoplanets tended to convey more reward than risk, compared to the articles about microbial life on Mars.
Although it is unknown what forms of life could potentially inhabit these newly discovered planets, such conditions similar to Earth may suggest life forms more readily associated with benefits for humanity, compared to microbial life for which a dynamic interaction with humanity may be more difficult to imagine. Nevertheless, the Pilot Study was limited in its ability to address the question of whether people would react differently toward various forms of alien life, as it contained just a small sample of media coverage, in which no direct announcements or claims were made of discovering new types of life, and as the results may not generalize to individual reactions.
Future research should use more direct, large-scale tests of reactions to different forms of extraterrestrial life. We also wish to highlight some considerations to be made when using news articles for similar studies in the future.
In the Pilot Study, the articles were selected from well-known sources with generally high scientific standards. However, it would be interesting to explore whether other news outlets that have lower standards for scientific reporting, or favor sensationalism, would show the same positivity bias. Another limitation worth noting is that in Study 2 we opted to use real newspaper articles covering scientific discoveries and these articles differed in length Mars Meteorite article: words, Synthetic Life article: words.
We did so as this had the benefit of helping us to gauge reactions to a real past announcement of ET life and as it avoiding confounds, biases, and participant suspicion that may have arisen had we generated our own materials.
However, it is possible that the difference in positivity bias across these two conditions might have been related to differences in article length, although we are not aware of research suggesting that people respond more positively vs.
That said, future researchers who wish to replicate or build upon the present work should attend carefully to the issue regarding the length of experimental stimuli to avoid this potential confound. Finally, the present work is in many ways a stepping-stone. We know that people appear to respond positively to the discovery of extraterrestrial microbes, but we do not know why. Perhaps such news causes people to take comfort in the fact that we are not alone in the universe. Perhaps it strengthens their worldviews, be they religious or scientific.
Perhaps it speaks to their desire for novelty. At present, we do not know the mechanisms by which this effect occurs, and we encourage future researchers to test these and other possibilities. We began this paper with a question: how will we react when we learn that alien life has been discovered?
If our findings provide a reasonable guide, then the answer appears to be that we will take it rather well. All materials, raw data, coded data, and preregistered predictions are freely available at the Open Science Framework, and can be accessed at osf.
This study was carried out in accordance with the recommendations of the Institutional Review Board at Arizona State University with written informed consent from all subjects. All subjects gave written informed consent in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. All authors listed have made a substantial, direct and intellectual contribution to the work, and approved it for publication.
This research was supported by seed grants from the Interplanetary Initiative at Arizona State University. The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. The authors also wish to thank Linda Elkins-Tanton for her support and advice on this research. Blaustein, J. Google Scholar. Brown, J. Evaluations of self and others: self-enhancement biases in social judgments.
Burchell, M. W h ither the drake equation? Carter, C. The X-Files [Television series]. Cohen, J. I would find all the info online I could find. I would keep up with it until I saw pictures of the life.
Then, I'd probably lose interest," one person wrote. As before, the respondents used more words indicating positive emotions, both for themselves and for humanity as a whole. Lastly, the team asked a different set of approximately Amazon Mechanical Turk users to read two stories in The New York Times and write down their reactions.
One group read a story announcing the now known to be wrong finding of fossilized Martian microbes in a meteorite recovered from Antarctica, and the other read a story described the creation of synthetic life forms on Earth.
As before, their responses were scored for positive or negative words, and as before, the responses were more positive than negative -- especially when it came to the alien microbes. He notes that, for a few hectic days, it really seemed like Martian aliens had been found in Varnum and his colleagues say their results suggest that reactions to technological aliens are likely to be similarly positive. The work comes at a crucial time in astrobiological research, says psychologist Doug Vakoch , who works on crafting interstellar communiques with the Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence project, or METI.
For one thing, Vakoch and others say, there are light-years of difference between acknowledging the presence of otherwise harmless microbes on the next planet over and being confronted with an advanced, technological alien race. As well, reactions to living aliens, whether microbial or not, are likely to be quite different than reactions to fossils, which is the scenario the authors probed with stories about the Martian meteorite. It is easy to imagine that it would be a more complex scenario across borders.
And in the event of a detection, the way news influences opinions will be vastly more complicated than one person simply reading a news story and logging their reaction. Near-Earth Asteroid a Mini-Moon? Print Email Share. Most Popular Stories. It's in the Father's Genes. Living Well. View all the latest top news in the environmental sciences, or browse the topics below:. Keyword: Search.
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