Alien hunters have released fresh guidelines on how to handle potential signals from intelligent life beyond Earth, in the hope of avoiding an outburst of panic, misinformation and confusion if any are detected.
While the idea of little green men may be a thing of the past, the possibility of intelligent civilisations elsewhere in the universe remains a serious topic among astronomers.
Experts say they hope the new guidance will prevent premature announcements and provide a framework for confirming and communicating such discoveries.
“I think we hope to avoid researchers ‘crying alien’ prematurely, and yet to let the public know we want to be as transparent and open as we can be,” said Prof Michael Garrett, the director of the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics and chair of the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) committee for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (Seti).
While some are still sceptical that alien life will ever be detected, Garrett suggested that with myriad experts scrutinising swathes of astronomical data, discovery of any detectable signal was only a matter of time.
“I don’t know if it’s this year, next year, or the next decade, or the next century, or whatever,” he said. “But eventually, someone’s going to find something – probably someone who’s not sitting there looking for aliens, but looking at protoplanetary disks or goodness knows what – and so these guidelines are really for that person or that group of scientists that suddenly find themselves confronted with this huge discovery and wondering: well, what does this mean and what are the implications?”
To read more, click here.