2 hours ago
11
Alien hunters have released fresh guidelines on how to handle potential signals from intelligent life beyond Earth, in the hope of avoiding an outburst of panic, misinformation and confusion if any are detected.
While the idea of little green men may be a thing of the past, the possibility of intelligent civilisations elsewhere in the universe remains a serious topic among astronomers.
Experts say they hope the new guidance will prevent premature announcements and provide a framework for confirming and communicating such discoveries.
“I think we hope to avoid researchers ‘crying alien’ prematurely, and yet to let the public know we want to be as transparent and open as we can be,” said Prof Michael Garrett, the director of the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics and chair of the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) committee for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (Seti).
While some are still sceptical that alien life will ever be detected, Garrett suggested that with myriad experts scrutinising swathes of astronomical data, discovery of any detectable signal was only a matter of time.
“I don’t know if it’s this year, next year, or the next decade, or the next century, or whatever,” he said. “But eventually, someone’s going to find something – probably someone who’s not sitting there looking for aliens, but looking at protoplanetary disks or goodness knows what – and so these guidelines are really for that person or that group of scientists that suddenly find themselves confronted with this huge discovery and wondering: well, what does this mean and what are the implications?”
The new protocols are an update on guidelines published in 2010 and, among other aims, set out how researchers should approach the verification of potential evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial beings, make announcements, and handle and store data.
As Garrett points out, social media has boomed in the past 15 years. As a result, rumours of an unexpected signal could quickly spiral out of control.
“[In 2010] it seemed to be a great thing, and now we realise that you actually have to be quite careful with social media. And you have to try and control the narrative of whatever your discovery might be so that it doesn’t get distorted in some way,” Garrett said.
But, he added, transparency matters. “We know that people think that these things are being kept from them, that these are government secrets and all the rest of it. But I don’t think that’s correct. At least in our group of Seti scientists, we want to demonstrate that we’re open and we want to be transparent, but we also want to do things carefully and to verify things before we kind of cry wolf about [them],” he said.
The protocols stress that researchers should make every possible effort to authenticate and substantiate detected signals, that verification reports should be peer-reviewed, and that verification data should be made publicly available.
They also advise that institutions and organisations should engage with news outlets, social media and other forms of communication and that responses should be prompt, accurate and honest.
But the protocols state individual researchers have the right to decline such interactions, with institutions and organisations advised to take action to keep their researchers safe.
“I don’t think anyone really thought about the personal safety of scientists back in 2010, but I suspect that’s more of an issue now because it’s pretty easy to pinpoint the location of people, where people work, where they live,” Garrett said.
While the guidelines are not enforceable, Garrett said they mattered – not least as there have been tantalising signals, as well as outright hoaxes, before.
“There’s still a bit of a giggle factor if you say you’re looking for alien civilisations, even amongst your colleagues, other astronomers,” Garett said. “So I think we want to make sure that we try and be as serious as possible and treat things in a proper way and so reduce the number of these false claims of having detected something. We think that’s particularly important for the credibility of what we do.”
The updated protocols come as Steven Spielberg’s new movie, Disclosure Day, hits cinemas – a film that tackles if, how and when inhabitants of Earth should be told aliens exist.
Just how worried humans should be by any signal depends, in part, on from whence the signal comes. A signal from a few thousand light years away could be uplifting, said Garrett, noting that such a signal would probably be from an older intelligent civilisation that had become technologically advanced and survived for a few thousand years or more.
“But if you were to detect something that was just outside the solar system, for example, that would be probably quite scary,” he said.
Prof Chris Lintott, of the University of Oxford, who was not involved in the document but did comment on previous drafts, welcomed its emphasis on transparency.
“In practice, news of any potential signal will almost certainly be out long before we can be certain what it is – the necessity to get observatories around the world to follow up on any signal means that very quickly hundreds if not thousands of people would be involved in any search, and in those circumstances trying to keep anything secret would be very difficult, if not impossible,” he said.
“I hope that these new guidelines encourage people doing Seti – as [with] all science – to do their work in public and take as many people as possible with them on the adventure of looking for life in the universe.”
Dr Rebecca Charbonneau, a historian of science and a research fellow at the Seti Institute’s discovery and futures laboratory who was not directly involved in developing the protocols, said the updated guidelines reflected the Seti community’s longstanding commitment to transparency and responsible discovery communications.
“The CTA-102 incident of 1965, when a mishandled signal detection sparked a global media frenzy over the possibility of alien contact, is part of what drove the original principles, and it’s a reminder – as the Covid pandemic also recently showed us – of how badly things can go wrong when there is no framework in place for communicating uncertain findings,” she said.
“The world is constantly changing, and the principles are written and updated to reflect that reality.”
