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11 de ago. de 2010 · Humaliens Battle, a free online Action game brought to you by Armor Games. Humans Vs. Aliens, choose your side, aliens or humans. Take charge of military operations and enter enemy territory by air, sea and land.
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25 de oct. de 2023 · 24 October 2023. By Jonathan O'Callaghan,Features correspondent. Nasa/JSC. This view of the Moon orbiting the Earth was taken by a human-built spacecraft more than 3.9 million miles away, but the...
31 de oct. de 2017 · Hollywood films and science fiction literature fuel the belief that aliens are monster-like beings, who are very different to humans. But new research suggests that we could have more in common with our extra-terrestrial neighbours, than initially thought.
- Overview
- Rejoice, or Riot?
- Related: Mars Exploration in Pictures
- Hitting Limits
Perhaps not the way you’d expect …
We’ve all seen them: Scenes depicting chaos, panic, and hysteria following the detection of alien life. Buildings crumble, fires rage, riots break out, societies collapse. If that’s how Earthlings are going to deal with the news that there’s life beyond on Earth, why risk looking for it?
Well, maybe it won’t be so bad after all. When humans do find evidence of alien life, “we will take it rather well,” according to recent results presented today at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Austin, Texas.
“Of course, I would also predict that if a hostile armada showed up near Jupiter, we wouldn’t be happy,” study author Michael Varnum of Arizona State University said today during a press briefing at the AAAS meeting.
Looking at a mix of news headlines and survey responses, Varnum and his colleagues found that people’s reactions to detections of alien life, both hypothetically and to the famously false announcement of microbial fossils from Mars, are generally quite positive.
“To be honest, I wasn't at all sure what we would find,” Varnum tells National Geographic. “It is worth noting that in fiction, often the discovery of extraterrestrial life is portrayed as having negative societal or psychological consequences.”
Varnum and his colleagues started by running a variety of relevant news stories through a language-analysis program and asking whether the words in those stories reflected emotions that were more positive (e.g., “happy,” “nice,” “good”) or more negative (e.g., “worried,” “nervous,” “annoyed”).
The stories the team chose covered the 1967 discovery of pulsars, strange dead stars that were initially hypothesized to be signals from intelligent extraterrestrials; the famous Wow! signal detected by SETI researchers in 1977; the 1996 “discovery” of fossilized microbes in the Martian meteorite ALH 84001; the strange behavior of Tabby’s star, which in 2015 was suggested to be the work of orbiting alien megastructures (now we know it’s just dust); and the 2017 discovery of multiple Earth-size exoplanets in the habitable zone of a star.
In these cases, the words used were more positive than negative, the team says, no matter whether the subject was microbial or technological alien life. Additional work also being presented at the AAAS meeting looked at news stories reporting that the interstellar asteroid Oumuamua could be an alien spaceship—and the findings are the same.
Next, the team asked Amazon Mechanical Turk users to predict their own reactions to the discovery of microbial alien life, and then offer an opinion on whether their response would be roughly in line with humanity’s in general. More than 500 respondents wrote down their anticipated reactions, which were analyzed in the same way as the news stories.
“I would be so interested in this. I would find all the info online I could find. I would keep up with it until I saw pictures of the life. Then, I'd probably lose interest," one person wrote.
As before, the respondents used more words indicating positive emotions, both for themselves and for humanity as a whole.
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A self-portrait of the Mars rover Curiosity.
A self-portrait of the Mars rover Curiosity.
Photograph by NASA, AP
“Nobody rioted in the street, despite the fact that these were aliens a mere 35 million miles from downtown Peoria,” he says. “I think it was because, Andromeda Strain aside, most folks don’t regard microscopic extraterrestrials as either threatening or enlightening.”
But not everyone agrees that the study’s results can be generalized. For one thing, Vakoch and others say, there are light-years of difference between acknowledging the presence of otherwise harmless microbes on the next planet over and being confronted with an advanced, technological alien race. Extrapolating from one scenario to the other isn’t necessarily going to be accurate.
As well, reactions to living aliens, whether microbial or not, are likely to be quite different than reactions to fossils, which is the scenario the authors probed with stories about the Martian meteorite.
Anthropologist Kathryn Denning of York University is also concerned that the Mechanical Turk users—the majority of whom, as the study identifies, are white, college-educated Americans—aren’t even close to representative of humanity as a whole.
“The leap involved in generalizing from this pretty specific sample to a broader human reaction is really problematic,” she says. “Another limitation of the study is that the American respondents were probably assuming that the discoveries were from American sources. It is easy to imagine that it would be a more complex scenario across borders.”
(The authors say they hope to replicate the work cross-culturally for this exact reason, and Vakoch notes that there’s already a bit of work in this area that looks at the differences in American and Chinese attitudes toward a first-contact situation.)
Denning also has concerns about categorizing the words used in news stories as simply “positive” or “negative” and using those results to infer any sort of complexity.
- 2 min
- Nadia Drake
6 de abr. de 2021 · AIR & SPACE MAGAZINE. The Science of Aliens, Part I: Would They Be Friendly, or Threatening? Any advanced alien species would have a social structure, but would also likely have predatory...
- Dirk Schulze-Makuch
How aliens will actually make first contact with humanity, a ...
About This Game. Natural Selection 2 pits alien against human in an action-packed struggle for survival. Wield devastating weaponry as a Frontiersman marine, or become the xenomorph as a deadly Kharaa lifeform.
