One of the more common posts I get from folks commenting on videos regarding the possibilities
of alien life is that if we ever did discover evidence of alien life whether near or far,
would the public be told?
It’s a fair point, the governments of this world don’t always tell us what they’re
doing or what they know.
But in the case of the discovery of alien life, it becomes complicated in that many
of the ways in which science could discover alien life isn’t under the control of the
government, or any one country for that matter.
The first complicating factor is that people tend to forget that this world has no single
government.
Rather it has over 195 countries, all with different governing authorities.
And science is being done in most of them one way or another.
Take China, they currently have the largest single dish radio telescope in the world,
and SETI research is on their agenda.
Clearly, they aren’t going to care if the US government or anyone else asks them to
keep a discovery of a radio signal of alien origin secret, they would only do so if they
deemed fit, and chances are they’d tell the world and stake their claim to the discovery,
probably the most important discovery in human history.
But another aspect of this is that most SETI experiments aren’t under government control,
no matter the country.
They’re often either privately funded entities working off of donations such as breakthrough
listen or through universities or other funding that has nothing to do with government.
For the US government, there was a very long period where funding SETI searches was off
limits for NASA due to a stigma imposed on it by a congressman that thought funding the
search for little green men was a waste of taxpayer money.
He later regretted that as he learned more about just what the search for extraterrestrial
intelligence meant, but the deed was done and only now is NASA starting to approach
the search for alien technosignatures once again.
So how do you keep a bunch of privately funded scientists quiet in an age of press releases,
email, leaks, social media and the fact that the scientists involved are often citizens
of many different countries?
The reality is that you can’t keep it quiet.
On this channel I have reported on a number of candidate SETI signals, from Wow to BLC1,
and none of them were successfully kept quiet.
Whenever something weird is seen in SETI, word of it usually makes it out.
Often within days of the discovery.
I’ve also spoken to many scientists in SETI on Event Horizon, and may more privately,
and no one has ever said that representatives from any government have showed up and given
them any indication that what they find must be kept secret, or even that they have to
keep quiet on it or else.
At least in the US, try to get such a thing through the court system.
It’s not illegal to look at the sky, and then scream it from the rooftops what you
see.
Granted it may be different in some parts of the world, but for most of it, the secret
cannot be kept.
And it wouldn’t be that damaging of a thing if a world 25 light-years away was found to
be emanating a technological radio signal.
It would be keeping a secret for the sake of keeping a secret.
If you saw some transmission, say it was radar or their version of I love Lucy what does
it actually change for humanity?
It tells us that we aren’t alone and aliens exist.
That shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.
We exist, and we are someone else’s alien civilization.
It would be the coolest and most profound discovery of human history, but it wouldn’t
likely be a threat, just a chance detection of someone else’s very, very distant existence
and technology.
People often say it would destroy the world’s religions, but if you really dig deeply most
interpretations of the world’s religions either say alien life is possible, or they
simply don’t address it all and focus specifically on the human.
In other words, it would have no real effect on religion other than in a handful of minority
interpretations.
In such a reality it would be news for sure, aliens exist, but most people would move on
with life, and other than us diehards looking for more information,.
Give me a verifiable SETI discovery that can be studied, and this channel has not yet even
begun to explore the possibilities of alien life.
But after a few weeks, it would simply be a matter of common knowledge that alien life
exists.
And by the time we discovered the 240th alien civilization, it might not even be a mainstream
news story.
Just another report of alien radar.
So the scientists, they can’t keep a secret.
They want to make that announcement, and take the credit for it.
It’s Nobel prize level material, and for proof of it, just look at the Wow signal and
other candidates for alien signals we have.
The information on those was freely given.
So the real question here is the other way you might find alien life, specifically if
it’s located close by.
And here we find something surprising, the potential discovery of alien life has been
officially announced three times by a government entity.
And that government was that of the United States, the one government often held up as
the one that would never tell its people of the existence of alien life.
Two of these were due to research done by NASA.
In 1976, the two Viking lander probes to Mars carried what’s known as the labeled release
experiment.
Essentially how this experiment worked is that it would take soil samples on the Martian
surface and expose them to nutrients.
The test came back positive, something in the Martian soil appears to have metabolized
the nutrients leading the announcement of the results.
For a short time, Mars appeared to have surface microbial life.
Pandemonium did not ensue.
But NASA jumped the gun, and other scientist called the results into question.
It may have been that the perceived metabolization was actually a chemical reaction with the
soil that had nothing to do with life.
Another question is the sterility of the Martian surface.
One can envision subsurface microbes hanging around in an aquifer, but it’s much harder
to envision microbes on the surface exposed to devastating radiation from the sun.
But the team maintains that it was a legitimate detection and the whole thing remains a mystery
within planetary science.
The second NASA announcement was work done in the 1990’s on a meteorite found in Antarctica
believed to have been of Martian origin.
It appeared that in clays embedded in the cracks in the rock there were microscopic
fossil remnants of something that resembled microbial life.
These traces had an issue, they were significantly smaller than any microbial life on earth.
There are hypotheses surrounding the minimum size for life, and an open question that microbial
life much smaller than what we’ve discovered may exist on earth.
But in the end, the results were again called into question by other scientists and the
controversy over the detection remains, though a consensus is forming that it was not, in
fact, evidence of microbial life.
So that’s two times that NASA essentially jumped the gun and were all too eager to tell
the world of the discovery of alien life, to the point that it might have been premature.
But that’s microbial life on Mars, which would not likely have an impact on affairs
here on earth other than calls to sterilize or isolate any samples returned from Mars
and give a heads up to any astronauts visiting the red planet.
Even then, it’s highly unlikely that any life on Mars could infect life on earth.
But here’s where this whole thing gets strange.
Microbes are one thing, but the detection of a close alien civilization is another.
And this is where we get to the third announcement of the discovery of alien life.
It wasn’t be NASA, it was by the US Army and it was Roswell.
The first explanation they gave of the origin of the object was that it was a crashed flying
saucer, only to walk that back the next day and say it was a weather balloon, only to
walk that back in the 1990’s saying it was a mysterious top secret project mogul balloon
designed to monitor soviet nuclear testing, only to alter it yet again by suggestion that
the reports of recovered bodies instead of outright stating they didn’t exist, suggested
that they were military crash test dummies as though such things had anything to do with
the very weight and altitude sensitive project Mogul.
Make of it what you will.
But the point is, the US government has a history of jumping the gun regarding the announcement
of alien life.
And there was a time when it was household knowledge that Mars had canals and a civilization
on it, perhaps drawing their plans against us.
It may even be that the early 20th century saw a higher level of belief in the US of
nearby alien life than exists now, though the numbers remain high.
At no time did pandemonium on a large scale happen, though there was some reaction when
people took Orson Welles’s 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast as real, where some number
of listeners, though it was never large, more is made of that incident than what actually
happened, took the story at face value and believed for a time that earth was being invaded
by Martians.
But there are also cases where it might make sense to keep the discovery secret, or even
disseminate false information on the topic.
This gets into whether you actually recover alien technology.
If you did, and you didn’t fully understand how it works, it’s probably a better idea
to keep the information highly compartmentalized and very secret as it gives you an advantage
over rival nation states so long as you can eventually back engineer it.
But you might also disseminate false information to throw your rivals off and either send them
on a wild goose chase or make them think your technology is more advanced than it actually
is.
And the final reason is the spooky one.
You might also keep it secret if it was abundantly clear that you were faced against a vastly
superior technological power and there simply isn’t anything you can do about it.
So unless it acts in a hostile way, it may simply be better not to inform the public.
This is the least likely however, given that if such a thing ever became known multiple
governments around the world would likely know, and someone would not be able to keep
a secret due to an increasing amount of people in the know.
Such a scenario might look like rumors, and claims of captured alien technology with no
confirmation.
Sound familiar?
Thanks for listening!
I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael Godier currently concerned about reckless
aliens that seem to crash into the ground a lot if the accounts are to be believed.
If that’s the case, aliens must have high insurance premiums, and not very good driving
lessons.
Not good and be sure to check out my books at your favorite online book retailer and
subscribe to my channels for regular, in-depth explorations into the interesting, weird and
unknown aspects of this amazing universe in which we live.