Extraterrestrial

NASA head comments on finding alien life

By T.K. Randall
December 7, 2015

Image: NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Credit: (PD) NASA/JPL-Caltech The discovery that we are not alone in the universe is likely to be one of the most important events in human history - but what procedures do we have in place to deal with such an eventuality ?

According to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, an encounter with an intelligent life form is so unlikely that the space agency has no policies in place at all for handling such a situation.

"We do have guidelines for dealing with microbial life if we find it," Bolden told IFL Science.

"In fact, we have guidelines that prevent us from, for example, on Mars getting too close to a place that may be a source of living organisms, because we don't want to contaminate that area."This policy of avoidance is also something echoed by Professor Stephen Hawking who, unlike Bolden, seems to take the possibility of contact with intelligent life a lot more seriously.

"We don't know much about aliens, but we know about humans," he said recently.

"If you look at history, contact between humans and less intelligent organisms have often been disastrous from their point of view, and encounters between civilizations with advanced versus primitive technologies have gone badly for the less advanced."

"A civilization reading one of our messages could be billions of years ahead of us. If so, they will be vastly more powerful, and may not see us as any more valuable than we see bacteria."

Source: Inquisitr.com

Tags: NASA, Charles Bolden, Extraterrestrial