It is the center of the Heart Nebula or the central cluster of IC-1805 stars called Melote 15. It is located in the Perseus Arm of the Galaxy in the constellation Cassiopeia. Credit – Getty Images; Xavier Zayas
Looking forward to news about life on Mars? You are 120 years late. That story broke on December 9, 1906, when The New York Times “There is life on Mars.” Evidence? “an army of canals on Mars” which is “an unanswerable argument for the existence of conscious, intelligent life.”
So…not so much. But the the time—and the world—on August 6, 1996, 90 years later something else cracked. At the same time, NASA announced that the chemicals and structures in a Martian meteorite that fell to Earth 13,000 years ago were fossils of ancient bacterial life. It was a discovery that the newspaper said “has been hailed as startling and compelling evidence.”
The news was so extraordinary that Pres. Bill Clinton called a Rose Garden press conference to discuss this. “If this discovery is confirmed,” he said, “it will certainly be one of the most surprising insights into our universe that science has ever discovered.”
Ultimately, this was not confirmed, and the Martian rock remains a mystery, still pointed to by some as evidence of life, but rejected by many. This leaves open and unsettling the question of life on Mars and elsewhere in the universe. And that, in turn, can spell trouble when the day comes when irrefutable evidence of life is discovered and scientists, political leaders, and the media must determine how to announce the news to an unsuspecting public who may respond with excitement, fear, skepticism, skepticism, or a whole range of other positive or problematic reactions.
“The concept of aliens is deeply embedded in our popular culture and our imagination,” says Brian Suldowski, an associate professor in the Department of Communication at Portland State University. “And so people likely have preexisting fears about those things based on things they’ve seen in the media, things they’ve read, other conspiracy beliefs they may have.”
In 2024, NASA took this up, convening a virtual astrobiology workshop called Communicating Discoveries in the Search for Life in the Universe. The online workshop was attended by more than 100 experts, including journalists, astrologers, social scientists and communicators — Suldowski among them. Recently, Suldowski and others co-authored a white paper published in the journal last fall Astrobiology Exploring the findings of the workshop – and the stakes couldn’t be higher.
“The search for life in space is not just a science question,” Suldowski says. “It’s a moral question, it’s a philosophical question, for some it’s a religious question. It has profound implications for our basic understanding of what it means to be human.”
Looking for aliens
Extraterrestrial life can be detected in one of two forms: alien biology or, more sensationally, alien technology. In recent years, footage has been captured of Navy pilots flying objects diving, turning, and moving through space in ways no known aircraft can manage. These Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP – today’s polite term for UFOs) created such a stir that they were the subject of congressional hearings in 2022. Not only have lawmakers figured out what UAPs are, but Americans have clearly made up their minds. According to a 2021 survey by the Pew Research Center, 51% of respondents believe that UAPs are of foreign origin. At the NASA workshop, that news was met with incredulity.
“Astrobiologists couldn’t understand why the public would believe it,” Suldowski says. “They said they were shocked.”
What Pew finds particularly striking is that Americans are approaching the idea of foreign travel with a decision. Song – Joy. Fully 87% of polls reported that if the craft were indeed aliens, they posed no threat to Earth. Only 7% said they were not friendly.
Definitive evidence that aliens move among us—one of those UAPs landing on a naval airstrip, say—can evoke an entirely different public response, including fear. That’s where journalists can come in.
“We saw this with COVID,” says Suldovsky. “When you’re communicating about risk, it’s important to communicate what we know and, more importantly, what we don’t know and the steps we’re taking to protect the public interest. With intelligent life, you’re talking about protecting the planet. Managing public fear is going to be incredibly challenging, although it’s possible that they should at least communicate publicly about how they can protect themselves.”
The discovery of microbial life in Earth rocks like the 1996 meteorite would be a different story. There may still be fears – in the case of contamination with an alien pathogen – but NASA scientists have already proven adept at keeping the public safe from alien rocks when quarantined with 842 lbs on the Apollo days. The lunar samples were brought back by six lunar landing missions, sealing them in containment laboratories and working through glove boxes. Still, those security measures will take some explaining.
“We can’t assume the public understands the way we do this research,” Suldowski says.
Alien microbes or other biology can also be discovered remotely—on the home planet of life forms—a less dramatic scenario than finding them on Earth. The White Paper states, “[C]Communicators must prepare the public to ‘see traces from distant places before seeing faces’.
Instruments for that kind of remote investigation are now being deployed. On January 11, NASA launched the Pandora Space Telescope, which will search for signs of life on 20 different exoplanets—planets orbiting stars other than the Sun—by looking for spectral signatures of water vapor, methane, oxygen, or other chemicals associated with biology.
In October 2024, the Europa Clipper spacecraft was launched, bound for a flyby of Jupiter’s moon Europa, which is covered in ice beneath which scientists believe there is a warm, salty, amniotic ocean that could harbor life. In April 2023, the European Space Agency launched its Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) spacecraft, which will study Europa and its sister moons Ganymede and Callisto, also looking for chemical signals of biology. All this, says Suldowski, means that the first signs of life in space are more likely to be untraceable in chemical graphs than biology suggests but does not prove. That will take some explaining.
“Media coverage of these types of discoveries uses words [evidence] ‘Coherent with life,'” she added.
This level of nuance can be challenging to relay clearly and simply to a blockbuster news-craving public or a science-skeptic public. And that requires a level of trust not just between the public and experts, but between experts and those who communicate their science to the public.
Since only a small fraction of people will read the published paper reporting the discovery, it will be up to journalists—print, online, cable stations—to communicate the news, and Suldowski worries how well that will be done. “We have very few science journalists,” she says. “We have lay experts who sometimes cover the science. Many scientists I’ve talked to are hesitant to talk to media outlets because they’re worried their science isn’t going to be communicated accurately.”
Deadline pressure doesn’t help. Neither does the search for a quick and clicky headline that is going to attract eyeballs. “The challenge is amplified by media trends that often favor brief, exciting stories over elaborate explanations of ambiguity,” the white paper says.
Educating the public
NASA has a way of studying and communicating subtle astronomical findings, called the Cold Scale — short for Confidence in Detecting Life. The measure is composed of seven levels of scientific validation, with level 1, the lowest, “detecting a signal known to be the result of biological activity;” At level 2, defined as “pollution”. [some flaw in the detection] are excluded;” up to level 4, “all known non-biological sources of signal have been shown to be implausible in that environment;” and finally up to 7, “independent, follow-up observations of predictable biological behavior.” A scientist who makes it to 7 gets to ring the bells of biology – laypeople trying to follow developing research at this time can be thoroughly confused.
One way to combat this is to educate the public in advance, providing a steady stream of news releases before research begins, explaining the science in simple, descriptive language. This allows scientists to familiarize a general audience with the work they are doing and to “prebunk” — or proactively correct — misconceptions and rumors before announcing any breakthroughs. To that end, the white paper recommends that a full-time communications professional be associated with any research team.
Also important is distinguishing between misinformation and disinformation and combating both. Misinformation is an honest misunderstanding of science, while disinformation is a deliberate misrepresentation to create sensation or promote conspiracy theories. This is especially easy to do with the growing popularity of deeply fake and AI-generated images or videos.
It is never too early to begin the learning process. The White Paper recommended establishing a curriculum in elementary and secondary schools to teach students about the scientific method, scientific skepticism, and the complex and often ambiguous nature of scientific evidence.
How likely life is to be found depends on which mission or research project is looking for it. For now, the white paper points to three areas of research as most likely to yield results: the study of icy moons by spacecraft such as JUICE and the Europa Clipper; the search for habitable, Earth-like worlds by spacecraft such as Pandora; and efforts to bring Martian soil and rocks back to Earth by robotic spacecraft – a mission long in the planning at NASA. The paper’s authors call on communications professionals to embed themselves with all three of these teams and be prepared for anything they might discover.
In a universe with several trillion planets, there are certainly non-zero odds that at least one of them, like our own world, is a chemical kitchen that could cook up living things. There are also non-zero odds that Earth scientists will one day discover that life. As they work to invent that, the public must work to understand it when it comes.
Write in Jeffrey Kluger at Jeffrey.kluger@time.com.
