As well, reactions to living aliens, whether microbial or not, are likely to be quite different than reactions to fossils, which is the scenario the authors probed with stories about the Martian meteorite. It is easy to imagine that it would be a more complex scenario across borders. And in the event of a detection, the way news influences opinions will be vastly more complicated than one person simply reading a news story and logging their reaction.
To help approach those questions, Vakoch points to the work of Ted Peters , a theologian who has explored how finding life beyond Earth would affect religious beliefs. His work suggested that people who were confident in their own religious beliefs could make room for the existence of ET—meaning, Vakoch says, that even something as thorny and seemingly at odds with science as religion can survive an alien assault.
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Instead, it should be seen as a progressive endeavour, reflecting the process of science itself. This will involve scientists, technologists and the media talking to each other to agree firstly on objective standards of evidence for life, and secondly on the best way to communicate that evidence.
This, they say, should preferably be done now before a detection of life is made, rather than scramble to put it together in the aftermath. Steps 3 and 4 focus on finding out whether the environment around the biosignatures is actually habitable, whether a biological explanation is the best and only one, or if there are other contaminating sources. Importantly, being familiar with this scale would mean that everyone involved — from scientists to the media to the public — would be aware that any individual result might be knocked out at any stage.
The last step would be the hardest, especially when considering the potential findings of current missions. The rover is equipped with all kinds of instruments that would allow it to detect life right up to level 5, but it would take an analysis of samples returned to Earth to achieve level 6 — and reaching level 7 might involve follow-up investigations on other places on Mars.
Nobody pretends the Drake Equation is the final word. Astronomers looking for alien signals have examined only a few thousand star systems so far. But as SETI Institute senior astronomer Seth Shostak has noted , the rate at which researchers are able to process the massive amounts of data that radio telescopes receive doubles approximately every 18 months to two years, meaning it grows by a factor of ten every six years or so.
The Milky Way has around billion 10 11 star systems that could conceivably host intelligent life under our current assumptions. An estimate of , 10 5 active civilizations in the galaxy would mean one per million star systems. At the exponential rate of growth in signal processing, researchers will have examined one million candidates by around , bringing the odds of a discovery into the probable. See you in , aliens. To continue reading: or Sign In. Your browser is out of date.
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