If They Find Life in Space, Scientists Are Worried About Breaking the News. Here’s Why

Waiting for news about life on Mars? You’re 120 years late. That story broke on Dec. 9, 1906, when The New York Times ran a major piece under the brooking-no-argument headline, “There Is Life on the Planet Mars.” The proof? “The legions of canals on Mars” which are “an unanswerable argument for the existence of conscious, intelligent life.”

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So…not so much. But the Times—and the world—got another crack at things 90 years later, on Aug. 6, 1996. That’s when NASA announced that chemicals and formations in a Martian meteorite that crash-landed on Earth 13,000 years ago were the fossilized remains of ancient bacterial life. It was a discovery that the newspaper said “is being hailed as startling and compelling evidence.”

The news was so extraordinary that Pres. Bill Clinton convened a Rose Garden press conference to discuss it. “If this discovery is confirmed,” he said, “it will surely be one of the most stunning insights into our universe that science has ever uncovered.”

Ultimately, it wasn’t confirmed, and the Mars rock remains something of an enigma, still pointed to as evidence of life by some, but rejected by most others. That leaves the question of life on Mars and elsewhere in the universe open and unsettled. And that, in turn, could spell trouble when the day at last comes that irrefutable proof of life is found and scientists, political leaders, and the media have to determine just how to announce the news to an unpredictable public that could respond with excitement, fear, suspicion, skepticism, or a whole range of other positive or problematic reactions. 

“The concept of aliens is deeply embedded into our popular culture and in our imagination,” says Brianne Suldovsky, associate professor in the Department of Communications at Portland State University. “And so people are likely to already have preexisting fears about those things based on the things they’ve seen in the media, the things they’ve read, other conspiracy beliefs they might have.”

In 2024, NASA took up the matter, convening a virtual astrobiology workshop called Communicating Discoveries in the Search for Life in the Universe. Over 100 experts including journalists, astrobiologists, social scientists, and communicators—among them, Suldovsky—attended the workshop online. Recently, Suldovsky and others co-authored a white paper published last fall in the journal Astrobiology exploring the workshop’s findings—and the stakes couldn’t be higher.

“The search for life in space isn’t just a science question,” Suldovsky says. “It’s a moral question, it’s a philosophical question, for some it’s a religious question. This has deep implications for our fundamental understanding of what it means to be human.”

Finding the Aliens

Extraterrestrial life can be discovered in one of two forms: alien biology or, more sensationally, alien technology. Much has been made in recent years of footage captured by Naval pilots of what appear to be flying objects diving, turning, and hovering in space in ways no known aircraft can manage. These unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP—today’s polite term for UFOs) created such a stir they were the subject of Congressional hearings in 2022. Lawmakers did not suss out just what the UAPs are, but Americans have apparently made up their minds. According to a 2021 survey by the Pew Research Center, 51% of respondents believe the UAPs are of extraterrestrial origin. At the NASA workshop, that news was met with incredulity.

“Astrobiologists could not comprehend why the public would believe that,” says Suldovsky. “They said they were flabbergasted.”

What makes the Pew finding particularly remarkable is that Americans are taking the idea of alien visitations with a decided sang-froid. Fully 87% of the people polled reported that if the craft are indeed alien, they pose no threat to Earth. Only 7% said they are unfriendly.

Definitive proof that the aliens move among us—one of those UAPs landing on a naval airstrip, say—could stir up an entirely different public reaction, including fear. That is where communicators could come in.

“We saw this in COVID,” says Suldovsky. “When you’re communicating 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 is going to be incredibly challenging, however it is possible to communicate in a way that at least gives the public information about how afraid they should be and what they can do to protect themselves.”

The discovery of microbial life in a rock on Earth like the 1996 meteorite will be a different matter. There may still be fear—in this case of contamination with an alien pathogen—but NASA scientists already proved themselves adept at keeping the public safe from alien rocks back in the Apollo days when they quarantined the 842 lbs. of moon samples the six lunar landing missions brought back, sealing them in a containment lab and working on them through glove boxes. Still, those safety measures will take some explaining.

“We can’t assume the public understands that that’s kind of baked into the way we do this research,” Suldovsky says.

Alien microbes or other biology could also be discovered remotely—on the life forms’ home planet—a less dramatic scenario than finding it on Earth. The white paper says that, “[C]ommunicators need to prepare the public to see ‘traces from faraway places before they see faces.’” 

Tools for that kind of from-a-distance research are now being deployed. On Jan. 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 other chemistry associated with biology. 

In October 2024, the Europa Clipper spacecraft was launched, bound for flybys of Jupiter’s moon Europa, which is covered in a rind of ice beneath which scientists believe lies 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, says Suldovsky, means that the first signs of life in space are more likely than not to be a telltale wiggle on a chemical graph which suggests biology but doesn’t prove it. That will take some explaining.

“Media coverage of these types of discoveries use words like [evidence] ‘consistent with life,’” she adds. 

It can be challenging to clearly and simply relay this level of nuance to a public wanting blockbuster news, or a public that’s skeptical of science. And it requires a level of trust not just between the public and the experts, but between the experts and those communicating their science to the public.

Since only a tiny share of people will ever read the published paper that reports the finding, it will be up to journalists—in print, online, on cable stations—to convey the news, and Suldovsky worries about how well that job will be done. “We hardly have science journalists anymore,” she says. “We have generalists who sometimes cover science. A lot of scientists I talked to are hesitant to talk to media outlets because they’re worried their science isn’t going to be accurately communicated.”

Deadline pressures don’t help. Nor does the hunt for the quick and clicky headline that is going to attract eyeballs. “The challenge is amplified by media trends that often favor concise, exciting narratives over detailed explanations of ambiguity,” the white paper says.

Educating the Public

NASA has a solution for how best to study and communicate subtler astrobiological findings, known as the CoLD scale—short for confidence of life detection. The scale is made up of seven levels of scientific certitude, with level 1, the lowest, being “detection of a signal known to result from a biological activity;” to level 2, defined as “contamination [some flaw in the detection] is ruled out;” on up to level 4, “all known non-biological sources of signal shown to be implausible in that environment;” and finally to 7, “independent, follow-up observations of predicted biological behavior.” A scientist who makes it up to 7 gets to ring the biology bell—by which time layfolk who have been trying to follow the developing research may be thoroughly confused.

One way to combat that is to educate the public in advance, providing a steady stream of news releases even before the research begins, explaining the science in simple, descriptive language. This allows scientists to familiarize lay audiences with the work they’re doing and to “prebunk”—or proactively correct—misconceptions and rumors before any breakthroughs are announced. For that, the white paper recommends that a full-time communications professional be affiliated with any research team.

Also important is distinguishing between misinformation and disinformation and combating both. Misinformation is an honest misunderstanding of the science, while disinformation is deliberate misrepresentation in order to create a sensation or foster conspiracy theories. That’s especially easy to do with the increasing popularity of deep fakes and AI-generated images or videos. 

It’s never too early to start 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.

Just how likely it is that life will be found depends on just which mission or research project is 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 like JUICE and Europa Clipper; the search for habitable, Earthlike worlds by spacecraft like Pandora; and efforts to bring Martian soil and rocks back to Earth with robotic spacecraft—a mission long in the planning at NASA. The authors of the paper call for communications professionals to be embedded with all three of these teams and prepared for anything they might uncover.

In a universe with many trillions of planets, there are surely non-zero odds that at least some of them, like our own world, are chemical kitchens that can cook up something living. There are non-zero odds too that earthly scientists will one day spot that life. Just as they are working to make that discovery, the public must work to understand it when it comes.