From Aliens to the End of the World: Nick Sagan Answers YOUR Facebook Questions!

I really appreciate all the questions and sorry if you asked one I didn't have time to answer. 

--Nick Sagan

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Q: Are we ready to make contact?

A: In “Alien Encounters” one of the many excellent points Neil deGrasse Tyson makes is that we can barely get along with ourselves, so how are we going to get along with aliens?  We’re not ready, he says, and looking at our history to this point, he’s probably right.  That said, one can imagine scenarios where first contact brings out the best in us.  And perhaps we’ll find a civilization that’s faced similar challenges in their own history, a people who know how to conduct themselves in a way that maximizes the chance that the experience will be positive for all involved.

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Q: What do you think an advanced civilization would have to gain by making contact with us?

A: It’s hard to predict extraterrestrial motivations but I would imagine an advanced civilization would gain as much from making contact with us as we might upon discovering an intriguing but primitive new species of life.  We’d be a subject of curiosity, perhaps expanding their understanding of how life develops on worlds other than their own.  On the other hand, we may be so far behind them in our development that we’d be utterly uninteresting to them (which may explain why we’ve yet to hear from anyone.)

Science's General Manager Answers YOUR Questions (on Aliens)

A few weeks ago we put out the call to our Facebook and Twitter followers to ask ANY question of Science's General Manager, Debbie Myers. There were sooooo many responses, it's going to take some time to make our way through them -- and we didn't want to play favorites. So, we had Debbie pick the questions out of a hat (or in this case, a jar).

We'll be posting more of her answers shortly, but here's one that's particularly relevant to our celebration of "Are We Alone?" month:

 

Please keep your questions coming. Debbie has pledged to get through as many as she can! Oh, and don't forget to join our search for alien life here!

Debbie Myers
General Manager
SCIENCE

Are We Alone in the Universe?

When Jodie Foster's "Contact" came out, I was a graduate  student studying the impact of media and technology in our society. I remember being both disappointed and relieved at the thought that moment of alien contact depicted was only a film world sci-fi fabrication. I couldn't imagine that humans, with all our ego and ignorance, could handle meeting beings whose intelligence we could never hope to surpass. We prefer more knowable beings: clear-cut enemies like the voracious predators of "Alien," or the little goofballs from "E.T." and "Men in Black."

Little did I know at the time, Jodie Foster's character was largely based on a real person: Jill Tarter, director of the SETI Institute and a world leader in the search for intelligent life beyond Earth. Over the past year, I have had the good fortune to be able to work directly with Ms. Tarter on an exciting project here at Science Channel.

Zeroing in on Alien Life

It used to be that searching for signs of alien life meant blindly searching any corner of space in hopes of stumbling across something — anything — meaningful. Not surprisingly, us humans have come up empty so far.

But thanks to data from NASA's Kepler telescope, we finally have a way to apply some method to the madness. The mission of the Kepler program is to search a section of the Milky Way galaxy for other Earth-like planets. The main objective from NASA's perspective is to find possible new homes for humans. But the SETI Institute is using the telescope's data to see if any newly-discovered planets already have intelligent life residing there.