NASA Announces How It Will Report ET Contact
NASA Chief Bill Nelson says looking for extraterrestrial life is part of NASA’s mission, as its top scientists call for a detailed system for classifying ET life.
In a huge departure from the US government’s historical treatment of UFOs and possible ET life, NASA administrator Bill Nelson said in an interview with University of Virginia professor Larry Sabato, “[W]ho am I to say that planet Earth is the only location of a life form that is civilized and organized like ours?”
Meanwhile, top NASA scientists are calling for a scaled system for reporting any evidence of extraterrestrial life modeled after NASA’s progressive scale of Technological Readiness Level already in use for new spaceflight equipment.
Instead of the binary “life or no life” way of looking at off-planet discoveries, these scientists are suggesting a more nuanced way of reporting what they find. Cheryl Costa, retired journalist, UFO statistician, and author of the UFO Sightings Desk Reference, thinks it’s about time.
“I think it’s long overdue, they’ve been talking about this stuff for years. They know that there have been unidentified things in our skies since biblical times,” Costa said. “The fact that they’re finally owning up to the idea of classifying alien life. Their scale is going to have to run the range of organic molecules all the way up to sentient beings, so it needs to be a pretty big scale, and it’s nice to start seeing bonified scientists looking at this issue and saying ‘OK, we need to do this.'”
And what about NASA Administrator Bill Nelson’s comments?
“I think it’s refreshing that the NASA chief came out and said ‘Yeah, maybe’ on the UFOs and off-world life. I think they still know more than they’re telling us. I’m happy NASA is coming out with this stuff, I think they’re trying to feed it to us a little spoonful at a time. They don’t want to scare the populace,” Costa said.
This seems to be a big change from the past when, during the Cold War, the government ran a concerted effort to discredit anyone who spoke out about UFOs, what was the mood like in the country back then?
“Let’s go back to the Cold War, post-WWII, yeah we had foo fighters, I’ve interviewed former vets flying B-17s and things who said ‘Yeah, we saw those things and we thought it was the other side,’ then after the war, they found out the other side thought it was us,” Costa said. “The more common aspect of UFOs being reported in the last two generations started with us setting off three nukes back in 1945. Within two years we suddenly had them on scale, what they called the “massive wave of 1947,” and that was a big deal. Then what happened a few years before the Roswell incident? In 1938 on Halloween Eve, Orson Welles scared the snot out of the country.”
“So here we are in 1947, we’ve got this wave of UFOs going on, think about those guys, barely 10 years before talk of aliens scared the heck out of everybody. So, there was this whole idea that maybe the American public isn’t ready for this.”
Now in 2021, not only are governments exploring space, but private companies are in their own space race. Now that we appear to be “ready” for this, could we see Disclosure in our lifetime?
“I think we will have to, we’ve got so much going on with our environment. And two things the ETs who have talked to people on the ground have said “Take care of your planet,” that’s been a continuing thing, and the other driving thing is they’re very concerned that we have a proliferation of nuclear weapons. And our whole present-day sighting is driven by the fact that we set off three nukes back in 1945 and the aliens have been very touchy about that. They don’t want us off this rock with our current politics and all that,” Costa said.
And there is hope with the latest developments at NASA and existing departments within the agency we may see evidence of off-planet life.
“There’s a whole division in NASA that looked at the idea of what some of these exoplanets had for gravity and atmosphere. They’ve gone out and postulated what kinds of life might survive in those environments, and it was very creative how they looked at it, and a very possible thing because life always seems to find a way,” Costa said.
DNA Might be the Best Bargaining Chip We Have With Aliens
If we ever needed to barter with an advanced alien species, our DNA might be the best currency we could offer, according to Daniel Helman, a professor of Labor Relations and Trade Unions at Ton Duc Thang University in Vietnam.
That’s because our technology would likely be antiquated compared to theirs, making it essentially useless in trading and bargaining. But if we could give them something completely unique to our specific planet, there’s a good chance they may be interested.
Helman first proposed this idea at the International Space Development Conference, and later expanded on it in an interview with Motherboard.
Our DNA he said, is like a record of millions of years of evolution and interaction with Earth’s environment, and if we could give them mapped-out documentation of this, they may consider it useful. The Human Genome Project and other attempts to catalogue our DNA would be a good starting point to begin negotiations.
Barring the possibility these extraterrestrials might have some sort of highly advanced system to fast track DNA sequencing, we would already have a solid foundation of background knowledge in epigenetics – how the environment affects the expression of genes – and evolutionary processes that have led to most modern species on Earth.
Helman also points out that he believes our gradual destruction of biodiversity on the planet lowers the number of bargaining chips we hypothetically have to trade. The more animals go extinct, the less DNA we have – unless we start storing embryos and DNA samples in the Doomsday Vault.
Though, one concern with Helman’s idea is that giving up the building blocks to life on Earth might lead extraterrestrials to develop diseases that could wipe us out. But if they had technology vastly superior to anything we have, they would probably have the means to destroy us in a number of ways.
Essentially, the argument hinges on whether these extraterrestrial visitors are bent on conquering or making friends with us. A timeless hypothetical, but for the sake of Helman’s argument, we should consider the latter scenario.
And in the sense that our biggest obstacle to the next level of technological advancement is surviving ourselves, it’s more likely that developed alien species would lean towards the peaceful side. For us, perpetual global conflicts and the looming threat of nuclear war could be the deciding factor in whether we continue as a species that explores the galaxy or destroys itself.
So, if an alien race has advanced far enough to make it to Earth, it’s likely our global infighting and environmental destruction would look petty and archaic to them. So it might be time we develop a disruptive marketing strategy for our DNA, and prepare for an intergalactic game of poker.
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Watch Chase Kloetzke discuss the potentials of various agendas an alien species might have visiting Earth on this episode of Beyond Belief:
