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.
To read more, click here.