This is the center of the Heart Nebula or IC-1805, at the center is a cluster of stars known as Melotte 15. It is located in the Perseus arm of the galaxy in the constellation Cassiopeia. Credit – Getty Images; Javier Zayas
Are you waiting for news about life on Mars? You are 120 years late. That story broke on December 9, 1906, when The New York Times ran a major piece under the no-argument title, “There Is Life on Mars.” Proof? “The legions of canals on Mars” which are “an unanswerable argument for the existence of conscious and intelligent life”.
So… not so much. But the one Times— and the world — had another crack 90 years later, on August 6, 1996. That’s when NASA announced that chemicals and formations from a Martian meteorite that crashed into Earth 13,000 years ago were the fossilized remains of ancient bacterial life. It was a discovery that the paper said was “being hailed as stunning and compelling evidence”.
The news was so extraordinary that pres. Bill Clinton called a press conference to discuss the Rose Garden. “If this discovery is confirmed,” he said, “it will certainly be one of the most amazing insights into our universe that science has ever uncovered.”
In the end, it was not confirmed, and the Mars rock remains an enigma, still pointed to as evidence of life by some but dismissed by most others. That leaves the question of life on Mars and elsewhere in the universe open and unresolved. And that, in turn, could spell trouble when the day comes when irrefutable proof of life is found, and scientists, political leaders, and the media must determine how to break the news to an unpredictable audience that might respond with excitement, fear, suspicion, skepticism, or a whole host of other positive or problematic reactions.
“The concept of aliens is deeply embedded in our popular culture and our imagination,” says Brianne Suldovsky, an associate professor in the Department of Communications at Portland State University. “And so people may already have pre-existing fears about those things, based on things they’ve seen in the media, things they’ve read, other conspiracy beliefs they might have.”
In 2024, NASA addressed the issue, convening a virtual astrobiology workshop called Communicating Discoveries in the Search for Life in the Universe. More than 100 experts, including journalists, astrobiologists, social scientists and communicators – Suldovsky among them – participated in the workshop online. Suldovsky and others recently co-authored a white paper published last fall in the journal Astrobiology exploring the findings of the workshop – and the stakes couldn’t be higher.
“The search for life in space is not just a scientific question,” says Suldovsky. “It’s a moral question, it’s a philosophical question, for some it’s a religious question. This has profound implications for our fundamental understanding of what it means to be human.”
Finding aliens
Alien life can be discovered in one of two forms: alien biology or, more sensationally, alien technology. Much has been made in recent years of images captured by naval pilots of what appear to be flying objects that dip, spin and float through space in ways that no known aircraft can manage. These Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs—today’s polite term for UFOs) created such a stir that they were the subject of congressional hearings in 2022. Not only did lawmakers learn what UAPs were, but Americans apparently made up their minds. According to a 2021 survey by the Pew Research Center, 51% of respondents believe UAPs are of extraterrestrial origin. At the NASA workshop, the news was met with disbelief.
“Astrobiologists couldn’t understand why the public would think that,” says Suldovsky. “They said they were stunned.”
What makes Pew’s finding particularly remarkable is that Americans are taking the idea of alien visits with aplomb. song-joy. 87% of those surveyed reported that if the craft are indeed alien, they pose no threat to Earth. Only 7% said I was unfriendly.
Definitive proof that aliens are moving among us—one of those UAPs landing on a naval airstrip, say—could provoke a very different public reaction, including fear. That’s where communicators could intervene.
“We saw this in COVID,” says Suldovsky. “When you communicate about a risk, it’s important to communicate what we know and, more importantly, what we don’t know and the steps that are being taken to protect the public interest. With intelligent life, you’re talking about planetary protection. Managing public fear will be incredibly challenging, but it is possible to communicate in a way that gives the public information about how they should protect themselves.
Discovering microbial life in an Earth rock like the 1996 meteorite will be a different matter. There may still be fear — in this case of contamination by an alien pathogen — but NASA scientists already proved adept at keeping the public safe from alien rocks back in the Apollo days, when they quarantined the 842 lbs. of lunar samples they brought back from the six lunar landing missions, sealing them in a containment lab and working on them through the glove box. However, these safety measures will require some explanation.
“We can’t assume that the public understands that this is somehow baked into how we do this research,” Suldovsky says.
Alien microbes or other biology could be discovered remotely on the home planet of life forms, a less dramatic scenario than finding them on Earth. The white paper states that “[C]communicators must prepare audiences to see “traces from distant places before they see faces.”
Tools for this type of remote research are now being implemented. 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 – looking for the spectral signature of water vapor, methane, oxygen or another chemical associated with biology.
In October 2024, the Europa Clipper spacecraft was launched, destined for flybys of Jupiter’s moon Europa, which is covered by an icy shell 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 of this, Suldovsky says, means that the first signs of life in space are more likely to be a telltale blip on a chemical graph that suggests biology but doesn’t prove it. This will require some explaining.
“Media coverage of these types of discoveries uses words like [evidence] “consistent with life,” she adds.
It can be challenging to clearly and simply convey this level of nuance to an audience that craves success stories or an audience that is skeptical of science. And it requires a level of trust not just between the public and experts, but also between experts and those who communicate their science to the public.
Since only a small fraction of people will ever read the published paper reporting the discovery, it will be up to journalists—in print, online, on cable—to break the news, and Suldovsky worries about how well that job will be done. “We barely have any science journalists left,” she says. “We have generalists who sometimes cover science. Many scientists I’ve talked to are hesitant to talk to media outlets because they’re worried their science won’t be reported accurately.”
Deadline pressures don’t help. Neither is the hunt for the quick, clicky title that will catch the eye. “The challenge is amplified by media trends that often favor concise and interesting narratives over detailed explanations of ambiguity,” the white paper says.
Educating the public
NASA has a solution for how best to study and communicate more subtle astrobiological findings, known as the CoLD scale—short for Confidence in Detection of Life. The scale consists of seven levels of scientific certainty, with level 1, the lowest, being “detection of a signal known to result from biological activity”; at level 2, defined as “contamination [some flaw in the detection] is excluded;” to level 4, “all known non-biological signal sources shown to be implausible in that environment”; and finally at 7, “independent, subsequent observations of predicted biological behavior.” A scientist who makes it up to 7 can ring the bell of biology – at which point laymen who have tried to follow the emerging research might be completely confused.
One way to combat this is to educate the public in advance by providing a steady stream of press releases even before the research begins, explaining the science in simple, descriptive language. This allows scientists to acquaint lay audiences with the work they are doing and proactively “declare” or correct misconceptions and rumors before advances are announced. To this end, the white paper recommends that a full-time communications professional be affiliated with any research team.
Also important is the distinction 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 deep fakes and AI-generated images or videos.
It is never too early to begin the education process. The White Paper recommends that curricula be established in primary 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 the mission or research project doing the searching. For now, the white paper points to three areas of research as having the greatest chance of yielding results: the study of icy moons by spacecraft such as JUICE and 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 with robotic spacecraft—a mission long in NASA’s planning. The paper’s authors call for communication professionals to be embedded in all three of these teams and prepared for whatever they might discover.
In a universe with many trillions of planets, there is certainly a non-zero chance that at least some of them, like our own world, are chemical kitchens that can cook up something alive. There is also a non-zero chance that Earth scientists will one day see that life. As they work to make this discovery, the audience must work to understand it when it comes.
Write to Jeffrey Kluger at jeffrey.kluger@time.com.