The Message

When we discover life in the universe, how will we find out? Most likely, through the news.

An example of that is from a CBS radio broadcast from October 30, 1938.

A series of news bulletins chronicled the discovery of something unusual happening on Mars. As the broadcast continued, the event escalated, and there’s reports of an invasion by aliens.

It was described as the night America panicked. But it wasn’t real. It was The War of the Worlds, a radio play.

“It was one of the first studies of what people's reactions to a potential discovery of extraterrestrial life was like,” said Katherine Denning, an anthropologist at York University.

Those bulletins were part of a radio play, orchestrated by Orson Welles as an adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel The War of the Worlds.

An early analysis of that reaction found more than a million people believed the broadcast was real, and nearly the same amount were frightened by it.

Matthew Seeger is a professor of communication at Wayne State University in Michigan. He studies crisis communication and what the field calls disruptive events.

“Certainly the War of the Worlds is a great example of that,” he said, “where society became supposedly very disrupted as a consequence of the possibility of an alien encounter, but the research literature clearly demonstrates that that's not the case.”

People weren’t as panicked as we once thought. If there was a real discovery of aliens these days, he said, “we're not going to see people screaming and and you know running and hiding and engaging in all sorts of irrational behavior.”

So how will we react when that news comes? And how will we get that news in the first place?

Former Senator Bill Nelson served as NASA administrator during the Biden administration. I asked did he ever think about the news of life elsewhere breaking when he was in office. He said of course he did. I asked if he thought we’re ready for such an announcement.

“With our inquisitiveness as a people, with our exploration being a part of our DNA, of us constantly looking for a new frontier – I often say the frontier now is not westward as it was when we settled the country, the frontier is upward,” he told me. “With that as a people in our DNA, I think that that'd be maybe a page one story in our newspapers.”

I asked him how he would break that news to the public.

“If I were there, I'd be a straight shooter, and I'd say exactly what it was,” he said.

That, in fact, is the plan.

SETI Institute president and CEO Bill Diamond told me that if a finding went through rigorous and independent verification, they’d say exactly what it was.

“What we would do is share with everybody what we've observed, what we can factually say about that observation, what phenomena was it,” said Bill Diamond, president and CEO of the SETI Institute. “Whan what can we say about it?”

And that’s the plan. At least, on paper.

“We should probably take care how we do this,” said Michael Garrett, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Manchester. He’s also the chair of the International Academy of Astronautics’s SETI Permanent committee, which wrote the 2026 protocols for what to do if you discover alien life.

We discussed those protocols back in episode three. They talk about how a finding needs confirmation. Different groups of scientists taking observations with different telescopes — independent verification.

Garrett said that once all that independent verification is done, it’s time to tell the world.

This could be one of the most consequential announcements of human history – and we’re not sure how humanity will react.

“I imagine it'll be quite a big thing,” he said. “There's journalists there, TV, and a large panel of experts that can take questions on this and we try and be, you as transparent as possible”

That would be in the form of a press conference – an opportunity for experts to talk to the media and influencers about a news event. It’s a way for journalists and content creators to get the story out but it’s also a way to control the narrative. The scientists making the discovery want to be the ones to tell the story. It’s a way to get the primary source – and credible information — in front of the public.

If there’s no press conference, the information gets out elsewhere. It’s like a game of telephone – and inaccurate information could quickly permeate social media.

But the news of alien life might come out before scientists can even get to the point of coordinating a press conference.

“Somehow the news will probably break before anyone wants it to break, or at least there'll be major rumors circulating about it,” said Garrett. “Maybe that's not a bad thing, because when that happens, it gives people a chance to get used to the idea. It’s just not all of a sudden out there.”

This isn’t a new phenomenon.

“If you look at the way big scientific announcements have been done in the past, first of all, it's been actually really difficult to keep them under wraps,” said Garrett. “I don't think this will be any different."

Science journalist Nadia Drake agrees.

“If there's something that's been detected and it's credible and it's going through the process of being independently verified, that's gonna leak,” she said. “That’s not going to stay quiet. People are terrible at keeping secrets."

Leaks lead to other problems like confusion, said York University anthropologist Katheryn Denning.

“It’s a situation where you have a tantalizing piece of evidence, then somebody leaks it somehow. It gets all over social media. You don't yet know whether you actually have the discovery for sure or not,” she said. “That's a period of confusion which could last hours, days, weeks, or years, or potentially even decades in some of these situations.”

That leaves gaps in understanding. It’s not that scientists are hiding anything. They’re still actively trying to confirm a finding.

Communication experts say that when there’s an information vacuum, someone will step in to fill that void.

There’s ways to combat that. And again, it comes down to transparency.

“What you can do and what you should do, as a scientific enterprise, is provide the best information that you have, as responsibly and as quickly as you can, and as clearly as you can so that it can be understood by as many people as possible,” said Denning. “It’s our responsibility but it's also kind of the best tool that we have for trying to counter the misinformation that will almost inevitably arise."

The people involved in this kind of work are now dealing with another challenge, like AI-mediated communication and things like deepfakes.

“I imagine within the next year or two it'll be really difficult to distinguish a deepfake from the real thing, said Garrett. “It muddies the waters in terms of communication. It's hard for them to tell the difference between reality and something that's been faked up."

He said this is something that still needs addressing in the protocols he helped develop.

“I think we're a little bit behind the curve on that, and so the protocols don't really go into this at all."

But the protocols do go into protecting the scientists making the discovery on social media. People are going to believe what they want to believe.

Something so world changing like this could elicit negative reactions – ones that target the scientists, or even the people close to them.

“We want to make sure that a scientist who makes this discovery kind of knows what they're getting themselves into,” said Garrett. “There will be a lot of public interest in a discovery like this. There will be scrutiny, not just of the data or the paper, but personal scrutiny of the researchers that are involved.”

The protocols state that researchers have the right to decline engaging with the press or social media for this reason if they fear they might be subject to cyber bullying. It’s up to the scientist’s organization, whether it be a university or research group, to protect those that make the discovery.

And this might not be a one-time thing, either. A discovery may not just be a single finding. Or one viral video. A single press conference. Science, and the search for life, is always evolving. Lucianne Walkowicz is the co-director of the Discovery and Futures Lab at the SETI Institute.

Discoveries are not these single points in time, but rather these evolving events that can take sometimes many years for us to understand the implications of,” said Lucianne Walkowicz, the co-director of the Discovery and Futures Lab at the SETI Institute.

Regardless of how the story breaks, or how long it takes, how will the public react? And will they understand the implications?

“The word panic is a bad word in disaster research,” said Seeger. “We don't see panic."

These events, in the communication field, are called disruptive events. Think of natural disasters or Covid-19. Seeger thinks about the discovery of life elsewhere in the universe as if it would be a disruptive event.

Those events don’t typically create panic.

“We're not going to see people screaming and and you know running and hiding and engaging in all sorts of irrational behavior. In fact, my expectation is the initial response will be ho hum,” said Seeger. “I think we can speculate or extrapolate from other events that this would not necessarily result in widespread social panic, unless it turns out that this is the alien that pops out of people's chests – the evil destructive alien.”

Putting that example aside, Science journalist Nadia Drake envisions a similar reaction.

She points to media saturation. Stories like this have already permeated headlines, especially with recent interest in things like UAPs and UFOs – and those false alarms we talked about earlier in this podcast.

There’s already plenty of other news stories that demand our attention. Would something like this even cut through the noise?

“There has been a certain amount of saturation in headlines, especially around the UAP conversation,” she said. “There's these claims of biosignature detection, and I think on some level people are just like, 'Yeah, okay. Yeah, we get it.'"

There is still much uncertainty over how people might react. There has been some empirical research looking at public perceptions of news stories like these — or looking to predict how they might react. But it’s something that’s never happened before, and it’s difficult to compare to something else in history

“We don't actually know, for the majority of the world, what people think — what pre-existing ideas they have, said Walkowicz. Whether those perceptions are positive, negative, mixed, something in between those things, some secret third thing."

I asked science journalist Nadia Drake if she’s thought about whether or not the public would even believe that what we are telling them – as journalists reporting on science – is even true? 

“God, that's so bleak,” she said.

That’s because she understands that trust in news media is near historic lows, although increasing slightly based on new data from Gallup. While trust in science is slightly on the rise, it hasn’t fully recovered to pre-pandemic levels and is deeply split by political party, according to the Pew Research Center.

Communication researcher Matthew Seeger worries that the state of the information ecosystem today will lead to misinformation. People are less likely to believe the experts quoted in news media reports.

”We don't trust the subject matter experts broadly as much as we did until relatively recently. It really has been the disinformation campaigns around things like climate change, and then later COVID-19, that have undermined the role of the subject matter expert.” he said. “That’s created a real problem.”

Especially when the plan to tell the world relies on the media. That press conference? Will people believe the experts in attendance? Is this the right way to go?

What’s happening outside of traditional news media is also concerning, says Seeger, especially considering the role the social media influencer has on wider public perceptions.

“We often place individuals who have no background in particular issues in very powerful positions because they have so many followers,” he said. ”Influencers will become really important and will, I'm sure, have an outsized role in trying to frame the meaning around these particular events."

Seeger points to crisis communication, like that of a natural disaster, as a way to look at the role traditional media might play in this story.

“Journalists do try to be especially responsible during a crisis situation,” he said. “They view journalism in general as having a very, very important role in protecting the public around a disruptive event."

But he warns that with something so big as this story … there could be missteps

“The media has, on occasion, maybe more than on occasion, sensationalized particular issues, and this certainly would be a very sensational event,’ he said, and certainly fodder for outrageous media representations.”

It’s very likely that when we find them, you’ll hear it in the news, or from someone you follow on social media. That information will shape how you feel about this discovery, how you handle this paradigm shift.

For philosopher Chelsea Haramia, the magnitude of this discovery makes it really difficult for scientists, journalists and the public to be ready for that day.

“The full answer is that no one is sufficiently prepared,” she said. “By extension, no, the media are not either. But that is because no one is sufficiently prepared. If for some reason tomorrow there were some sort of immediate discovery that was confirmable in a moment, people would find out very fast that no one is prepared."