What will our reaction be when we discover aliens?

[MUSIC PLAYING] IRA FLATOW: Hi, I’m Ira Flatow, and you’re listening to Science Friday. One of the most irresistible questions in stories about aliens, after they arrive, of course, is what will our reaction be when we learn of their existence. Will it be horror, bewilderment, relief, euphoria? It’s a scenario we love to imagine again and again, as in Steven Spielberg’s recent movie Disclosure Day.

SPEAKER 1: What are you going to do?

SPEAKER 2: Full disclosure to the whole world.

SPEAKER 3: That truth will upend all established order across the entire world.

IRA FLATOW: Really? Really? How would you react if we learned of intelligent aliens? Can you actually study that? Well, it turns out there’s a whole group of people inside SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, that is thinking about this, what the public response might be and how to prepare for it. We have the lab’s co-directors here to talk about the research that’s been done to answer these questions. Let me introduce them to you. Dr. Lucian Walkowicz is an astronomer at SETI, who has worked on NASA’s Kepler mission and Hubble Space Telescope.

Dr. Chelsea Haramia is a senior research fellow at the University of Bonn in Germany and philosopher ethicist at SETI. And as I say, they’re the co-directors of the organization’s Discovery and Futures Lab. And just a heads-up, we will be having a few minor spoilers for Disclosure Day. Welcome, both of you to Science Friday.

LUCIAN WALKOWICZ: Pleasure to be here. Thank you, Ira.

IRA FLATOW: Nice to have you. You’re both the co-directors of this new lab at SETI. What exactly does this lab do, and how do you ask the questions we were just talking about?

LUCIAN WALKOWICZ: Sure. So the Discovery and Futures Lab is a research initiative. I think the tendency is to think that a question like “how will people respond to the discovery of alien life” is merely a matter of opinion. But there are many opinions. And it’s not just a matter of opinion. You can actually study that. So some of the questions that we might want to ask are, how will people react? And also, how should scientists actually convey what is happening during a discovery?

In media, we often see these pivotal single moments of discovery. But in practice, we can all look at the ways that discoveries unfold in real time and understand that they’re not a single moment. A discovery is something that we might get an initial inkling of or find something interesting, but then it has to be confirmed and tested and debated amongst experts and then communicated to people often as it is happening and often as information is complete. And in many ways, it is difficult to say when a discovery is actually over.

When do you have all of the complete information? So some of the research that we can do, for example, is to look at the ways in which scientists are conveying what they are learning as these high-profile discoveries unfold. And then what are the best ways that people will understand the significance of those discoveries, while also not– like you don’t want to foment a bunch of fear, for example. But I think Chelsea has a completely different lens on this.

CHELSEA HARAMIA: Well, I was going to bring it back to the Disclosure Day clip at the beginning here. And so in Disclosure Day, if you’ve seen it, they make it very much a moment, not just scientifically but for the media, where there is literally a moment where everyone in the media is immediately and suddenly on board.

And this is confirmed, and it’s true. And every reputable organization is out there telling everyone about it. And for people like us, that’s very laughable. And I assume for your average audience member, you also recognize that as Hollywood and not particularly realistic.

IRA FLATOW: Tell me why that’s not realistic.

CHELSEA HARAMIA: Well, I mean, if you watch the movie beyond the media, I think what we focus more on is the fact that the scientific confirmation is not likely to be a moment. It might be. But it’s not likely that it will be just this moment where suddenly scientists know. It may take a long time to get that first evidence of detection, but then be able to confirm it and to cross-confirm it with other scientists in different parts of the globe. And so this idea that there is a moment of discovery is a little misleading if in the future, an actual discovery is the kind of thing that could take not just days, weeks, or months, but years or generations.

I will also say that one of the things that came up in the movie was this certainty among some of the characters that people were going to go crazy, that there was going to be mass hysteria. And this is one of the things that we want to study. And we have a colleague who does risk analysis. His name is Andrea Schwartz.

And one of the things that he has mentioned is this disabusing us of this notion that these kinds of things automatically translate into mass hysteria, into these overreactions from huge groups of humans. And it turns out that a lot of the risk analyzes show that those aren’t the typical reactions. People don’t typically react to this kind of news with out of control, mob-like behavior. That’s just not scientifically supported.

IRA FLATOW: Can you give me an example of some kind of reaction that you describe as comparable to discovering intelligent life that we’ve gone through, that they would study as a precedent for this kind of reaction?

CHELSEA HARAMIA: Sure. One of the examples that he gave, that I’m sure everyone is familiar with, is the War of the Worlds, famous radio broadcast that the history and the lore suggests that people started losing their minds. And there was mass hysteria.

And I think a lot of people know that that’s like overplayed and overhyped and that wasn’t the reality. But there’s still that lingering stereotype of people won’t be able to be normal or be cool if something big is announced. And maybe but also maybe not. And we don’t get to help ourselves to these conclusions until we’ve done the actual work.

IRA FLATOW: Religion is another big part of Disclosure Day, and one of the main arguments against disclosing the disclosure of intelligent alien life is that as you say, it will cause major religions to collapse. What do you think about this, Lucian?

LUCIAN WALKOWICZ: Well, can probably tell that I’m laughing because one of the things that I found really funny about Disclosure Day is that it keeps using the word “religion,” but then the only sort of religious representation in the movie is kind of vaguely Catholic.

IRA FLATOW: Catholic nun, to be specific. Yeah.

LUCIAN WALKOWICZ: Right. As the ambassador for all of the world’s religions, and even within Christianity, there’s a wide variety of orientations towards the existence of aliens. For example, Mormons, aliens are part of the religion. In fact, in the past, there has been funding moved through Congress by Mormon congresspeople because they have a vested interest in proving the existence of alien life. And there are plenty of examples of other major religions that routinely acknowledge the possibility or believe in the existence of these others beyond Earth. So for some religions, it might present some kind of problem, but for others, it really doesn’t.

IRA FLATOW: Do you think there’s a disconnect in the way scientists at SETI think about this question versus the public?

LUCIAN WALKOWICZ: Yeah, I think it’s not just scientists at the SETI Institute, per se. I think, in general, over the years that I’ve been in astronomy, I hear a lot of my colleagues who work on the search for life express a great deal of optimism and hope about what impact their research will have. And so you hear scientists who are engaged in the technical search for life, whether it’s through SETI or astrobiology, express that they think this will be such a transformative event.

But then, of course, you look at the surveys of even just the United States public. And you see that for a wide variety of people, they already believe that aliens exist somewhere in the universe, which I think scientists do as well. It’s just that for scientists, we want definitive evidence. We want to be able to prove it through scientific approaches.

And for a lot of people, just thinking it’s true is perfectly sufficient. And then, of course, some fraction of those folks also think that people are being visited by alien life, that there are landings here on this planet, et cetera. So clearly, what we as scientific researchers perceive as being this huge transformation, for many people who are not practitioners of science, that transformation, if it was going to happen, has already happened in the past or maybe isn’t as significant to them. And so that’s definitely a disconnect in what I think my community of fellow astrobiologists and SETI scientists think the impact of their work could be and what its actual impact might be.

IRA FLATOW: What about the impact on the scientific community, where for all these years, and going back to Carl Sagan and before that, talking about how we need extraordinary evidence for an extraordinary discovery? How would they react if it were true, do you think? Would they say, wow, how could we have been wrong for so many years, or well, that’s how science works?

LUCIAN WALKOWICZ: Well, one of the things that is really different now compared to in the past is the proximity of scientists to the communication of their science, and also to the demand for public information of a very high-profile discovery. So the most recent example that is outside of our field that you can think of is the pandemic. We had a very high-profile scientific research effort in development of shipment of vaccines that for many of those people involved in those developments was very high risk to them personally. There was a great deal of demand on them to communicate about the developments in science as they were happening. And this is the kinds of questions we’re interested in as well.

So just recently, the IAEA SETI Committee released these brand-new revisions of the post-detection protocols, which are a set of guidelines about what happens if a SETI search is successful, if there’s some sort of sign of intelligent, technologically advanced life found in the universe. And one of the things that they cite is things like the fact that individual researchers should make every effort to be open and transparent about the work as it evolves, what they are learning, et cetera, but that it shouldn’t be solely on them to communicate their work as it evolves because they also need to be doing the work themselves.

And in high-profile discoveries, that demand for more information can be quite intense. We all live in the era of social media in which many scientists themselves are science communicators. They’re present on social media. So for science and for scientists, I think there’d be a great deal of excitement. There’d be a lot of debate because that’s how science works. And then also, there would be these considerations of personal safety and how much they can communicate, et cetera, et cetera.

IRA FLATOW: After the break, what our guests think about the UAP hearings in Congress. Stay with us. What have you both made of the UAP hearings in Congress over the past few years, used to be known as UFO hearings? Have they informed your work in any way?

LUCIAN WALKOWICZ: Yeah, I think the UAP hearings and releases of information I think have been really interesting to watch. I view anything like that with a healthy dollop of skepticism. Number one, I think it is totally normal that we see things that are not explained in the sky all the time. And sometimes they can be incredibly mundane. Many sort of historical UFO sightings when people send up those lanterns that are like a paper bag with a little flame at the bottom of them, those historically create UFO sightings, et cetera.

But also, we know there are many militaries testing and exploring what they can do with different kinds of technology, some of which are known and some of which are not known. And so anytime I see a lot of action around that, I also view it as somewhat what opportunistic in that again harnessing public attention around something that potentially has a lot of cultural capital can also be used to create additional funding channels for military offices. If you want to make more funding for something in the government, what you do is you create a bucket It can go in.

IRA FLATOW: You go to DARPA.

LUCIAN WALKOWICZ: Exactly. Yeah. So maybe for some of the actors involved, they are about bringing to light things that aren’t being shared. But I think more often I view them as being about moving the scads of money around behind the scenes towards the ends of the people involved, whether those are perceptible to us or not.

CHELSEA HARAMIA: And there is such a diversity of possibilities when it comes to what a discovery might look like. In a UAP situation, something where aliens have physically made it all the way to planet Earth, that’s just one of many, many possible discovery scenarios. Study practitioners like to make it clear that they’re looking interstellary, and it’s actually easier in one respect at least, to verify if something far away is artificial or technological, than it is to verify that something here is artificial, technological, and extraterrestrial. Because we have a lot of artificial and technological stuff on our planet, in our solar system, from us. We’re the source. And that’s the challenge when you’re thinking about UAPs, is how to ensure that you can say this is aliens and not humans.

IRA FLATOW: But does UAP discussions, whether in Congress or amongst ourselves, ease the way for discovery of real intelligent life? I mean, are we prepared? Is this a runway over decades and millennia for that?

LUCIAN WALKOWICZ: Hmm. That’s an interesting question. I don’t that I would consider it much of a runway, because largely, a lot of what has plagued UAP sightings is a lack of good data. And one of the things that I think has also been difficult for people who have perhaps seen something in the sky that they don’t understand, in talking to people who have the technical skills to evaluate those things is that number one, the technical data usually doesn’t exist, and therefore the account is often anecdotal and often also personally meaningful to the person who has experienced it. So I think that there’s something instructive in there on how scientists can be better representatives of the scientific process and how discoveries unfold with time.

But ultimately, discovery can look like a lot of different things. It isn’t necessarily something coming here. It could be a chemical signature that we discover on a planet orbiting another star. It could be a radio signal. It could be a laser pulse, something like that.

And all of those different scenarios are extremely different in how people perceive them, their ability to understand the highly technical aspects of it. So in some ways, that now long cultural history of people seeing in things in the sky and attributing it to aliens, I don’t know that actually prepares us at all.

IRA FLATOW: Well, some really interesting stuff to think about. I want to thank both of you for taking your time to be with us today.

CHELSEA HARAMIA: Happy to.

LUCIAN WALKOWICZ: Thanks for having us.

IRA FLATOW: You’re welcome. Dr. Lucian Walkowicz, astronomer at SETI, and Dr. Chelsea Haramia, philosopher and ethicist at SETI. This episode was produced by Dean Peterschmidt. Thanks for listening. I’m Ira Flatow.