“Yes there have been crashed craft, and bodies recovered. We are not alone in the universe, they have been coming here for a long time.” – Apollo 14 Astronaut, Air Force Captain Dr. Edgar Mitchell.

 

Just a few short months ago, American astronomers testified to congress that extraterrestrial life certainly exists. There’s no question about it. Given the size of the universe, and how many stars and earth like planets there are, they must exist.

“The number of habitable worlds in our galaxy is certainly in the tens of billions, minimum, and we haven’t even talked about the moons. And the number of galaxies we can see, other than our own, is about 100 billion,” said Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer at California’s SETI Institute

During the testimony, Steven J. Dick, an astronomer and NASA historian said:

We’re looking at all scenarios about finding life. If you find microbes, that’s one thing. If you find intelligence, it’s another. And if they communicate, it’s something else, and depending on what they say, it’s something else! The idea is not to wait until we make a discovery, but to try and prepare the public for what the implications might be when such a discovery is made. I think the reason that NASA is backing this is because of all the recent activity in the discovery of exoplanets and the advances in astrobiology in general. People just consider it much more likely now that we’re going to find something — probably microbes first and maybe intelligence later. The driving force behind this is from a scientific point of view that it seems much more likely now that we are going to find life at some point in the future.

A theologian present at the testimony, Borther Guy Consolmagno, president of the Vatican Observatory Foundation, said “I believe alien life exists, but I have no evidence. I would be really excited and it would make my understanding of my religion deeper and richer in ways that I can’t predict yet, which is why it would be so exciting.”

Astronauts, astronomers and theologians alike have come together to urge a sense of calm in the face of first contact.

Do you think there will be a first contact scenario in our lifetime? How do you think humanity might react?