SO YOU’RE SAYING WE’VE BEEN SEARCHING FOR ALIENS WITHOUT A PLAN ALL THIS TIME?
NASA finally decided to take extraterrestrial life seriously and advised their top scientific community to come up with a plan when they actually do discover aliens.
James Green, NASA’s chief scientist, co-authored a new article that was published in the journal Nature in which he urged researchers to create a framework for reporting evidence of aliens. In the article, the authors stress on the significance of clear and open communication with any extraterrestrial life as well as establishing clear expectations for the public and giving them accurate evidence in the early stage.
“As life-detection objectives become increasingly prominent in space sciences, it is essential to open a community dialogue about how to convey information in a subject matter that is diverse, complicated and has a high potential to be sensationalized,” read the paper. So Google Translate won’t work, huh?
Green and his co-authors proposed a confidence of life detection (CoLD) scale to help evaluate any evidence that might be discovered. The scale contains seven different levels like different benchmarks that have to be met step by step before moving on to the next level. “Having a scale like this will help us understand where we are in terms of the search for life in particular locations, and in terms of the capabilities of missions and technologies that help us in that quest,” Green said in a NASA news release.
The CoLD scale is just the starting point for a larger conversation about interacting with aliens when the time comes. This news comes at the right time with the launch announcement of the Webb telescope as well as the Perseverance rover searching for life on the Red Planet. Seems like scientists are trying to hint at the possibility of discovering extraterrestrial life sooner than we expect. “Together, we can be stronger in our efforts to look for hints that we are not alone.”
