The night before Halloween in 1938, a story was being told over the radio across the United States. An announcer interrupted the regularly scheduled broadcast to describe an alien invasion. This was actually a hoax — a dramatization of The War of The Worlds, the science-fiction novel published by H. G. Wells in 1898. But millions were fooled by that authentic-sounding broadcast. Witnesses describe the sight of people running into the street in terror, convinced that Martians were attacking their country, but others say there was no panic at all. But regardless of what actually happened, the event did help create an understanding that would later be pushed again and again in science-fiction television shows and films: Humans are not going to react well if and when they encounter aliens. But what if, instead of horrifying monsters, aliens are just microscopic and not sentient? How would we react to them?
Michael Varnum, the subject of an article in The Atlantic, wants to answer. He is a psychology professor at Arizona State University and a member of the school’s Interplanetary Initiative, a space-exploration research project. Over the past few years, more and more scientists have started to think that microbes may exist on moons in our solar system, or in the subsurface oceans of Europa and Enceladus and the methane lakes of Titan. So Varnum and his colleagues conducted multiple experiments to try to figure out how people would react to news of microbial life elsewhere in the universe. They concluded that people might actually take it pretty well. Results showed that journalists and non-journalists both seemed to show more positive than negative emotions in response to news of extraterrestrial microbes. Certainly, not much panic could be expected in the streets.
Thanks for reading InsideHook. Sign up for our daily newsletter and be in the know.
