We may not have found any definitive proof of extraterrestrial life just yet, despite plenty of hope among scientists.
But if we were to ever come to an answer in the form of alien biology or technology, breaking the news to the general public could be much more difficult than one might think. As Time reports, the subject comes with an enormous amount of baggage, from preconceived notions of what alien life could look like from popular culture to fears over the implications of confirming we’re not alone.
“The search for life in space isn’t just a science question,” Portland State University Brianne Suldovsky told the magazine. “It’s a moral question, it’s a philosophical question, for some it’s a religious question.”
Suldovsky compared communicating the unknowns and managing fear to lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic. Except, when it comes to xenobiology, “you’re talking about planetary protection.”
“Managing public fear is going to be incredibly challenging, however it is possible to communicate in a way that at least gives the public information about how afraid they should be and what they can do to protect themselves,” she said.
Though evidence of alien life remains elusive, it’s certainly not for a lack of trying by researchers. Just over the last couple of years, we’ve launched numerous missions to probe distant and theoretically habitable worlds. Most recently, NASA launched its Pandora Space Telescope, which was specifically designed to study transiting exoplanets for the building blocks of life.
Yet conveying any tantalizing clues about life beyond Earth would be a challenge, as data from these kinds of missions would be limited to spikes of molecules in spectrograph readings, leaving it to communicators and other intermediaries to make sense of the findings.
Fortunately, NASA has already come up with a way to distinguish between subtle evidence and glowing neon signs that alien life does indeed exist. The agency’s Confidence of Life Detection scale was designed to provide a “framework for evaluating potential evidence of life beyond Earth,” ranging from Level 1, a “detection of a signal known to result from a biological activity,” to Level 7, or “independent, follow-up observations of predicted biological behavior in the environment.”
Even with the existence of such a framework, the public continues to be bombarded with plenty of noise, particularly following the advent of AI and the ensuing flood of disinformation. Cutting through this noise to confidently convey the stakes involved and exactly how far we are along in confirming the existence of alien life could be mission critical.
In a 2024 white paper Suldovsky coauthored alongside a team of communications experts and scientists, researchers urged for “fostering inclusivity and collaborating with artists, educators, and communicators.”
“It is helpful to view astrobiology discoveries and communication as part of a broader landscape of public trust in science, education, and internal scientific challenges, emphasizing interdisciplinary collaboration, especially with experts in risk and uncertainty communication,” they wrote.
“The outcome of a future tentative discovery of life depends partly on these proactive efforts,” the researchers concluded.
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