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Top boffins have claimed that humans meeting aliens will cause “greater anxiety” as we are not ready for it.
The claim comes from a new study created by Andreas Anton from the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health in Freiburg, Germany. In it, he claims that four possible ways for humans to find aliens – via a signal from deep space, a powerful telescope finding alien tech from the past or present, humans finding an artefact or . . . humans actually coming face-to-face with some kind of alien.
And it is the latter which probably won't end well for whoever meets one, or the general public when the information gets out there. However, he also claimed that it wouldn't just be the fact that we would be standing in front of an alien, as other factors and questions could cause issues.
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Mr Anton claims, in his study: “A biological life form, we suspect, could potentially cause greater anxiety, as the immediate question would be what 'they' want here. It also has an inbuilt assumption that they have a relatively nearby base or have superfast travel (maybe faster than light) and would thus be very far ahead of us technologically," Anton and co-authors write in their paper.
"However, the question of whether the encounter is with a biological life form or the emissaries of a machine civilization could remain unresolved for a long time.”
The report backs up what Dr Malcolm Schofield, a psychology lecturer at Derby University, told the Daily Star earlier this year when he stated that the confirmation of alien existence would leave us all “questioning reality”. He was speaking to us in the wake of NASA's “slightly dry” report released in September that neither confirmed nor denied the existence of aliens.
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Dr Schofield said: “There is a body of research, at the moment, looking at a term called ontological shock, as in ontology, the nature of reality. So if something this big comes out it's going to make a lot of people question that concept of reality, and it is going to make them question their beliefs and society at large.
“It's going to be quite a big deal. So I think as psychologists it will be very very important for us to take a role in that and kind of try and lessen that blow and just be very mindful of people's well being.”
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