Discovery of alien life might not bring the response you'd expect

“War of the Worlds. “Independence Day.” “Pacific Rim.” Hollywood is no stranger to tales of space aliens, and most seem to culminate in an epic fight to save the human race.

But let’s say we discover space aliens not on Main Street but on some distant planet. Will we panic — or heave a global ho-hum? A new study suggests the latter response is the more likely one.

For the research, a team led by Dr. Michael Varnum, an assistant professor of psychology at Arizona State University, analyzed the language used in and the tone of news reports describing three potential discoveries of extraterrestrial life:

a 1996 study about the possibility of fossilized alien microbes on a Martian meteorite;
the 2015 discovery of “Tabby’s Star,” whose erratic twinkling led some to suspect that it might be surrounded by an “alien megastructure;”

and a 2017 announcement that Earthlike exoplanets had been found within their host star’s habitable zone (where conditions are thought to be suitable for life as we know it).

What exactly did the analysis show? “We found significantly more positive vs. negative emotion in the media coverage,” Varnum told NBC News MACH in an email — a finding that led him to conclude that the population generally would be similarly matter of fact about the discovery of alien life.


Source :- nbcnews