If we discovered alien aliveness , people would be rioting in the street , predicate an goal to all religion and bow down to our supposed extraterrestrial overlords who would no doubt be hell - bent on conquer our major planet .
At least , that ’s one way to look at it . on the dot how humankind will react to the find of alien life – if it ’s ever made – has been the discipline of argumentation for quite some prison term . The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence ( SETI ) , for good example , has a stringentnine - step processto prepare citizenry for the news show .
But a group of researcher from Arizona State University has line up that people might not actually be that terrified ( by the discovery of microbial life , at least ) . They may , gasp , instead be rather overconfident about the whole thing . A pre - print of the study describe these findings isavailable online .
" What this propose is , there ’s no reason to be afraid , " Michael Varnum , one of the work ’s co - authors , toldLive Science . " We wo n’t crumble . We ’re not going to have topsy-turvyness in the street . "
In their study , they enter citizenry on Amazon ’s online survey creature call Mechanical Turk . In the first part , 501 masses were asked to compose responses to the supposed discovery of exotic spirit , and how they conceive the populace would react . The results point that people thought world would be reasonably positive about such a discovery .
“ mass conceive that they will respond positively to the discovery of extraterrestrial microbial lifetime and that world as a whole will do the same , ” the team wrote in their paper . So , all good there .
In the second part of the written report , 256 masses were move over an clause paint a picture that alien spirit may have been feel , and 249 were given an clause about synthetic aliveness being create in the laboratory . Again , people were generally positive about an announcement of alien life , tending to look more at the possible reinforcement rather than the risk . The research worker were n’t clear why , however .
“ Perhaps such word causes people to take comfort in the fact that we are not all alone in the creation , ” they write .
But on the whole , it seemed mass might be able to handle the detection of alien life pretty well . In our own Solar System , we’regetting closerto discover out if there is microbic liveliness on place like Mars or Enceladus . Perhaps a discovery one agency or the other is n’t too far away .
“ We began this paper with a query : how will we react when we learn that alien lifetime has been discovered ? ” the research worker wrote . “ If our finding provide a reasonable guide , then the answer is likely that we will take it rather well . ”
