Humans likely to react well to news of alien life

Humans are likely to be "pretty upbeat" about facing alien life, say scientists who analysed how Earth dwellers react to the news of finding ther life forms in the universe.
"So far, there's been a lot of speculation about how we might respond to this kind of news, but until now, almost no systematic empirical research," said Michael Varnum Assistant Professor at Arizona State University in the US.
In a pilot study, researchers analysed language in newspaper articles about past potential extraterrestrial life discoveries.
Through the work, they aimed to address the nature of reactions to extraterrestrial life by analysing reactions using a software programme that quantifies emotions, feelings, drives and other psychological states in written texts.

"If we came face to face with life outside of Earth, we would actually be pretty upbeat about it," Varnum said.
The articles in the pilot study focused on the 1996 discovery of possibly fossilised extraterrestrial Martian microbes; the 2015 discovery of periodic dimming around Tabby's Star, thought to indicate the presence of an artificially constructed "Dyson sphere;" and the 2017 discovery of Earth-like exoplanets in the habitable zone of a star.

The pilot study found that language in the coverage of these events showed significantly more positive than negative emotions.
In a separate study, the team asked more than 500 different participants to write about their own hypothetical reactions and humanity's hypothetical reaction to an announcement that extraterrestrial microbial life had been discovered.

Participants' responses also showed significantly more positive than negative emotions, both when contemplating their own reactions and those of humanity as a whole.
"I would have some excitement about the news. It would be exciting even if it was a primitive form," one of the participants said.
In another study researcher presented an additional sample of more than 500 people with past news coverage of scientific discoveries and asked them to write about their reactions.
The participants were divided into two groups. In one group, participants read a past news article from describing possible evidence of ancient microbial life on a Mars meteorite.

The second group of participants read a news article describing the claimed creation of synthetic human made life created in the lab.
Here too, the team found evidence of significantly more positive than negative emotions in responses to the claimed discovery of extraterrestrial life, and this effect was stronger in response to reading about extraterrestrial life than human made synthetic life.
"This discovery shows that other planets have the ability to have life on them. It's a very interesting and exciting finding that could be only the beginning," a participant said.
Varnum said the studies show that "taken together, this suggests if we find out we're not alone, we'll take the news rather well.