By Tim Binnall
An intriguing editorial penned by a team of NASA scientists argues that a framework for announcing the discovery of potential alien life needs to be developed in order to best convey that Earth-shattering information to the public. The thought-provoking piece, published in the journal Nature, begins with the bold observation that "our generation could realistically be the one to discover evidence of life beyond Earth" and then muses that "with this privileged potential comes responsibility." To that end, they note that there is intense interest in the possibility that 'we are not alone and, as such, they caution that the potential detection of evidence for ETs could be misconstrued by the general public and sensationalized by the media before such a discovery can be confirmed.
With that in mind, the paper posits that there needs to be an effort to educate people that, unlike how such a scenario is portrayed in pop culture, the discovery of life beyond Earth will not be a landmark moment that suddenly occurs one day. Instead, they say, confirmation of such a find will likely be the final step in a rigorous scientific process aimed at ensuring that the historic detection is the proverbial 'real deal.' "History includes many claims of life detection that later proved incorrect or ambiguous," the authors write, cautioning that these failed moments in the eyes of those expecting a blockbuster announcement threaten to weaken public trust in the scientific community.
Therefore, the paper calls for a recasting of the search for life as "a progressive endeavor" in order to "convey the value of observations that are contextual or suggestive but not definitive and emphasize that false starts and dead ends are an expected part of a healthy scientific process." In order to accomplish that that, the authors put forward the idea of creating a scale, similar to the current framework used for assessing potentially dangerous asteroids, which would chart how promising a potential ET discovery might be. This chart might begin with merely the detection of a promising signal from space and culminate with confirmation that it, indeed, is alien in nature.
Whether such a concept would be able to overcome decades of movies and TV shows depicting such a detection of alien life as an instantaneous moment, the framework would allow for scientists to develop a better system by which to judge various potential discoveries of that nature. Perhaps the most tantalizing aspect of the paper may simply be that it was written at all and that such a 'confidence scale' was put forward by NASA scientists, since it seems to suggest that we are closer than ever to finding something that could be proof of life beyond the end and that, as the authors write, it is time to start "an important dialogue" about how to best handle telling the public about such a development.