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Would You Fear Alien Life or Welcome It? (cnet.com)

If you've ever watched a science fiction movie about aliens, you'll know that humans tend to freak out and destroy everything when faced with incontrovertible proof of the existence of alien life. But a new analysis from Arizona State University psychology professor Michael Varnum and his colleagues suggests that humans might actually remain pretty calm and collected when that big news breaks. CNET reports: Varnum makes this conclusion based on an analysis of newspaper articles covering past potential discoveries of extraterrestrial life. Specifically, he and his colleagues looked at articles about the weird dimming of so-called "Tabby's Star," Earth-like planets around the star Trappist-1, and the potential discovery of Martian microbe fossils from 1996. They found language in the stories demonstrated much more positive emotion than fear or other negative emotions. In a second study, the team also surveyed over 500 people, asking them to guess how they and humanity would react to an announcement that alien microbial life had been discovered. In the case of both their own reaction and everyone else's, the participants hypothesized responses that were more positive than negative. The research was published last month in Frontiers in Psychology.

3 of 226 comments (clear)

  1. Stay calm, unless you're RIAA/MPAA. by Z80a · · Score: 4, Funny

    Given the only truly unique resource we have is our media, there is a possibility that the aliens would be here just to pirate everything, fly away and sell it on some space market.

    1. Re:Stay calm, unless you're RIAA/MPAA. by PolygamousRanchKid+ · · Score: 4, Funny

      Given the only truly unique resource we have is our media, there is a possibility that the aliens would be here just to pirate everything, fly away and sell it on some space market.

      I'm thinking that the aliens will be interested in our socialist media. They will hack Facebook and meddle with the world's election systems to get themselves elected. Then we will all be enslaved building pyramid alien monuments, and be slowing siphoned off as food.

      Don't blame me. I voted for Kodos.

      --
      Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
  2. Re: Indians by Hognoxious · · Score: 4, Funny

    They should make a movie about that. Make the aliens blue, just because.

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."