If one day scientists discover evidence of extraterrestrial life, how will they tell the world? How certain will they be of their discovery, and how will the public know what sense to make of it? Will the news cause fear, existential agony, dancing in the streets or merely a worldwide shrug? And how much will that reaction depend on the news’s delivery?
During four days in February and March astrobiologists, journalists, science communicators, communications scholars, ethicists and artists got together digitally at a NASA Astrobiology Program workshop to discuss those questions. Over Zoom the participants discussed how researchers might find that elusive evidence of alien life in the universe and how to talk publicly about those hypothetical discoveries. “We all have our own disciplines,” says Jack Madden, an astrobiologist-turned-artist, who attended the workshop. “And this is a multidisciplinary endeavor. So we’re isolated in the knowledge we have and what other people are doing.” Part of the goal of the project was to cinch that knowledge gap.
The motley crew at the event, called “Communicating Discoveries in the Search for Life in the Universe,” spent their four sessions together hashing out the lessons astrobiology could take from the past and the ways they might be applied to the future—a future in which, perhaps, scientists will find evidence of extraterrestrial biology.
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But here’s the problem with the future: no one can foretell it. Will a discovery of alien life ever happen? Is there any alien life? What forms might that life and its discovery take? And what will the headline writers of 2028 (or 2058 or 2888) do with all that information?
No one knows answers to those questions, but because scientists love to predict, they and the other workshop participants made educated guesses and gamed them out with an eye toward relaying information about aliens to the rest of this world. As with the question of extraterrestrial life itself, though, concrete answers and plans were hard to come by.
In trying to predict the future, the past is always key—history is wont to repeat itself, at least on Earth. And so the workshop attendees discussed old tales of extraterrestrial news, such as the story of ALH84001. Also known as the “Allan Hills meteorite,” this space rock traveled from Mars to land in the wilds of Antarctica, creating a dark, sharp spot among the ice fields. The meteorite had formed more than four billion years ago and then shot to space around 16 million years ago. It spent most of that time wandering the cosmic wilderness before ending up on Earth’s southernmost continent 13,000 years ago.
In 1996 a group of scientists—some of whom were affiliated with NASA—claimed in the journal Science that the special space rock, which the team had scrutinized closely by electron microscope, seemed to have microscopic fossils whose tubular, wormy character resembled that of earthly bacteria. “The image spoke immediately to a person,” Madden says—to laypeople, who know what bacteria look like, and to the scientists, who had been exposed to the same images of microorganisms for their whole life. “Having an image in that situation was so powerful,” he continues. The meteorite also had organic molecules and carbonate globules that contained magnetite, which further supported the idea that the rock might shake up the field of biology.
The findings, which were thought to potentially be the first evidence of life from another planet, shot through the headlines like the meteorite itself. Then-president Bill Clinton even gave a public speech about it after NASA had held its own press conference. “If this discovery is confirmed, it will surely be one of the most stunning insights into our universe that science has ever uncovered,” Clinton said. “Its implications are as far-reaching and awe-inspiring as can be imagined.”
In the view of most scientists, though, that confirmation hasn’t come through. Decades later the results remain the subject of debate, but the scientific consensus is that the rock’s chemistry and embedded shapes could be explained with mere geology and chemistry, not biology. During the initial announcements, officials showed caution and hedged their bets. “Like all discoveries, this one will and should continue to be reviewed, examined and scrutinized,” Clinton said.
But some scientists, including some who attended the workshop, see the hype around this preliminary and ultimately contested result as a failure nonetheless. They think that the finding’s announcers jumped the gun, prematurely waving “jazz hands” (a phrase workshop participants used to indicate official hype). This type of overpromotion can undermine trust and pass sticky but likely incorrect information into the public domain.
The kind of debate that ALH84001 started, though, is an important part of the scientific process. And scientific results are more likely to spark discussion that could lead, haltingly, toward the right answer if they are high-stakes—and maybe even a little hyped. Take, for instance, the 2020 announcement that scientists had found evidence of phosphine on Venus—and that, as far as they could tell, only life could produce that chemical on the searing, pressurized planet.
The result made splashy headlines—at the workshop, both journalists and scientists acknowledged that splashy headlines are here to stay—and it also caught the attention of scientists who scrutinized the claim and disagreed, in a debate that, like with ALH84001, is still going on. “This is how science evolves,” says Sarah Rugheimer, an astrobiologist and chair for the public understanding of astronomy at York University in Ontario and a workshop participant. “If I make a small, middling claim, no one’s going to care about it or read about it.”
Future discoveries are likely to include more like Venus’s alleged phosphine: today’s scientists, including many of those who attended the workshop, are keen to use super-powerful observatories such as the James Webb Space Telescope to search for “biosignatures” in the atmospheres of exoplanets—that is, chemicals they believe are produced by living beings.
Unlike with the Allan Hills meteorite, such data will provide nothing tangible to study, just photons and spectral fingerprints on computer screens. Proving that only living beings—and not, as with ALH84001, hypothetical quirks of geochemistry—have produced a purported biosignature is going to be difficult and maybe impossible. Scientists could send a probe to Venus to hunt for the hypothetical makers of phosphine, but any exoplanetary biosignature scientists find may be destined to be called “a sign that’s consistent with life” rather than “a sign of life” for a long time, if not forever. “I think that discovery of life is going to be an incremental process,” says Victoria Meadows, an astrobiologist at the University of Washington, who attended the workshop. “Unless something wanders past the camera and waves to us or encodes pi and transmits that in a radio signal, it’s not going to be definitive. And there’s going to be a lot of discussion going on.”
Scientists at the workshop and throughout history have worried that readers of news stories can’t hold that uncertainty or grasp the idea that follow-up research will be required. Some are not convinced that the public is scientifically literate enough to know or be shown that science is a process. But that’s perhaps an unfair assessment: often people see science as a set of settled results because that’s how it’s presented in public—in news stories and sometimes by scientists themselves. “At some level, we sort of hobble ourselves a bit in assuming that people can’t follow along, and I think that’s unfair,” Meadows says. In the workshop discussions, journalists called for agencies such as NASA to be more forthcoming, candid and timely—which would allow reporters to access the information and scientist sources they need to write about potential discoveries in a nuanced way. Many (though not all) scientists agreed, expressing frustration with the many levels of permission required to do public interviews and with statements carefully crafted by committee much too slowly for the news cycle.
Conveying where a result stands within ongoing debates while follow-up observations are happening is the key to good public information. But scientists are often reluctant to critique their peers’ work, and agencies such as NASA aren’t always keen to approve their researchers to do so. This makes it difficult, journalists at the workshop said, for the media or the public to evaluate a result’s status.
Something that could help with that is a set of “standards of evidence” for life claims—sort of like a key or legend to portray how many grains of salt to take with an alien life announcement. The standards would also show how those grains might dissolve as more evidence sluices in. “[The research process] is this arc of discovery, rather than a single point of discovery,” Meadows says. Scientists could come forward at any time during the research, including when results are far from certain, “as long as [they’re] clear about where [they] are in that process.”
Coming to the realization that the discovery of life, if it happens, will be an arc and not a point—and maybe a gray arc rather than a black-and-white one—was a process of its own for Rugheimer. “I started a little more bright-eyed and bushy-tailed way back when, and I thought we’d be able to” make a surefire discovery, she says. Now she’s taking a more practical approach. “The point when I pull out the champagne might just be what I consider a really strong signal but not something that might be 100 percent definite.”
To Adam Robinson, an astrobiologist at St. Petersburg College and a workshop participant, the process of looking for signs of extraterrestrial life—and the possibility of spending years discovering and interpreting these signs—isn’t frustrating. It is, he says, inspiring.
“It’s the whole idea of people planting trees for shade that they’ll never sit under,” he says. “I went to a conference two years ago, and I was sitting there listening to these people planning these planetary science missions [in which] they’d probably be dead when the data came back. And it’s awesome to see people just commit their lives and their whole careers to something that they may never see.”
At the conclusion of the workshop, participants tried to sum up their conclusions in shared Google docs, to mixed success. If there was one takeaway, it was that attendees of all sorts thought news of potential alien discoveries shouldn’t shy away from the caveats: good public reporting should talk about uncertainty, include criticism, discuss the arduous process of confirmation and be honest about how far in the future a yes or no to the “aliens?” question is likely to be. That kind of communication demonstrates transparency and gives important context, even if a headline doesn’t.
Much of the workshop’s discussion, somewhat contradictorily, was nonetheless about how scientists and agencies such as NASA could coordinate messages that reach the public about those same discoveries. Crafting a message so tightly, though, doesn’t typically engender trust or read as transparent—something journalists pointed out in discussions. And besides, it rarely works: Plan a big, choreographed press conference for your best biosignature candidate for Tuesday at 8:14 A.M. EDT, and someone can leak the results Sunday at zero dark thirty. If you write an understated headline for your press release, be prepared for a tabloid (or digital publication hungry for traffic) to run with “NASA Finds Aliens!!!”
And then there are the inevitable mixed messages that occur when people aren’t familiar with the research process. Take the Mars Sample Return mission, which is set to launch later this decade and will bring material from the Red Planet back to Earth, in part to search for evidence of life. In one of the workshop’s scenarios, participants considered what might happen if the mission returned remnants of something alive, which would leave people concerned that Martian germs might bring a new plague to Earth.
The chance that Mars has Earth-harming microbes is extremely small—but not zero. And that’s why scientists plan to treat all material brought back as if it could be very dangerous. “They’re going to be housed in a facility that essentially is what we use to manipulate deadly pathogens such as Ebola,” Robinson says—basically a biosafety level 4 lab meant to protect people outside and in from danger. “So people hear that, and they’re going to be like, ‘I’ve got a scientist telling me there’s probably nothing to worry about. Then why are they putting it in there if there’s nothing to worry about?’”
Another communication complication, according to the Zoom meeting attendees, is that a significant proportion of the public thinks that we already have found aliens. And who can blame people? Headlines have suggested as much over and over for years for titillating false alarms or inconclusive results. If a statement includes the words “found aliens,” that’s, sensibly, the part that sticks, even if it also says “might have,” and “possibly”—especially if it meshes with a reader’s, watcher’s or listener’s existing worldview.
To nobly convey uncertainty, the nature of the scientific process and ongoing debate, then, means to first debunk incorrect information. The fact that that incorrect information is out there, though, also suggests that maybe the discovery of extraterrestrials wouldn’t actually be that Earth-shattering. After all, people who think aliens are among us have just gone on with their life.
With all those complications (and more), Rugheimer was left, at the end of the workshop, thinking that perhaps the discussion had focused too much on the wrong things—specifically, message control.
No matter how scripted a press conference is, people are going to think what they’re going to think—and people being people, they’re going to think a cornucopia of things. We have to “be real,” Rugheimer says, about how the next potential alien discovery might go down. “Someone is going to find something they think is cool. They’re going to try to publish it first. They’re going to be overinflated in what that discovery is,” she says.
“This is what happens,” she adds. “We’ve seen this time and time again. That’s how science works, too.”
In fact, the historical scenarios the workshop examined basically all occurred like this—in direct contradiction to the plans the participants were making for the future. To expect that the future will somehow unfold differently while humans as a species remain the same is magical thinking, Rugheimer says. “I think we as a community need to come to peace with the fact that there’s only so much we can do to try to be careful,” she continues. “Because as soon as there’s an exciting discovery, no one is going to be careful. And that’s okay.”
Sure, she continues, it’s fine to think about and have Zoom meetings about how to communicate more responsibly than before. “But we also need to have some framework of how to handle it when it’s done wrong,” she says. “Because it will be.”
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