How to Report Life Beyond Earth Once We Get There?

After their tremendous trips to space, American billionaires are now planning to set-up business parks in orbit. As space exploration turns into a competition with greater private companies getting involved, the NASA wants to start a dialogue on how evidence of life beyond Earth should be reported, and it has called for a framework to be developed for establishing top reporting practices.

Last year, when world become excited about an ‘alien‘ signal that later turned-out to be interference from our own radio activity. But with greater private missions aiming for Mars in the close term, it is likely that we’ll find more evidence that might point the existence of extra-terrestrial life.

The article written by the experts at NASA points-out such “sensationalization” of any latest information that comes-out as a result of space missions and aims to start a dialogue on how such information should be conveyed.

“Establishing top practices for communicating about life detection may serve to set reasonable expectations on the early stages of a greatly challenging endeavour, attach value to incremental steps along path and build public-trust by making clear that false starts & dead ends are an expected and potentially productive part of the scientific process.” team said.

The article goes on to suggest several measures that could be used to determine and scale new discoveries in this domain. More like the Technology Readiness Level (TRL) that the NASA already uses to quantify the progress of a mission right-from-its concept stage to its actual execution, the article suggests development of Confidence of Life Detection (CoLD) scale which could be used to mark the significance of the discovery with low-levels reserved for identification of possible signs of life, while higher-levels reserved for more specified evidence of the subject.

Such a standardized-scale could help in establishing progressive benchmarks that could be interpreted just by scientific community and the public at large also, the article says.