What if we indeed find life out there and manage to prove that it is of an independent origin?* Part of the mission that all astrobiologists share will be complete and our science will finally be accepted even by the most conservative members of the scientific community – we will finally have actual subjects to study.
We have been asking the question for so long that we have forgot to think of what will happen when we get an answer. And sooner or later we will (I want to remind you that in order to prove the absence of extraterrestrial life we will have to search every corner in the Universe, and even then we won’t be sure if we haven’t missed something somewhere).
The Ugly Boring Aliens. Oh did I say unintelligent as well?
It is widely accepted that the first form of life that we might encounter out there will be very simple in nature, resembling bacteria or “simple” eukaryotes at best. And we all know that to anyone who is not a scientist by training the word bacteria itself sounds primitive. And this exactly makes me think that such a discovery won’t exactly thrill the general public. Of course, some extremely religious people will be shocked at first, but I am sure they will find a way to incorporate the aliens in their “view” of the world. Hopefully no one will be burned at the stake for that. Some sci-fi people will be thrilled too. Of course, the discovery of microfossils under some rocks on a larger rock somewhere billions of miles away will not exactly represent their idea of an inter-galactic union of civilizations.
And I think this will sum up the reactions to such a discovery. Oh wait, there ought to be at least one documentary about that. Wonder whether more people will watch the latest episode of Family Guy instead?
That’s it. People don’t want to see the creepy-crawlies. They want (understandably, I have to regretfully agree) to see dinosaurs walking through cold deserts in a world that has three suns in the sky.
Please forgive the negativity of my post. It is incredibly frustrating to witness the disinterest of the general public towards science. Towards the one thing that really makes us human.
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*Something which is next to impossible to prove, especially if alien life shares the fundamental building blocks of terrestrial life, such as nucleobases and amino acids. Life which greatly resembles ours will be deemed to share the same origin. Something like LUCA (last universal common ancestor), only on an interplanetary scale.
