Discovering alien life probably won't freak us out, studies say

cnet.com - Much of sci-fi tells us that when humanity is faced with incontrovertible proof of the existence of life beyond Earth, we're going to freak out and burn everything down like we just won the Super Bowl.

But now there's some scientific evidence that when that big news breaks, humans might actually remain pretty chill.

"If we came face to face with life outside of Earth, we would actually be pretty upbeat about it," Arizona State University psychology professor Michael Varnum said in a news release.

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.