Has this hi-tech age left us unfazed by idea of alien life"

[Savwafair2012 Profile]

The sight of flying saucers over Britain, so science fiction would have us believe, would see panicking mobs in the streets.
But it seems we may be far more worldly than writers, or over-protective governments, have ever given us credit for.
Psychologist Dr Albert Harrison argues that people have become so used to the idea of alien life that they would be ‘unfazed’ if the proof appeared before their eyes.



He said things have changed ­dramatically since 1961, when the U.S. Congress was warned evidence of extra-terrestrials would lead to widespread panic.
In North America and Europe at least, neither the discovery of an alien nor the detection of alien

radio signals were now likely to lead to ‘widespread psychological disintegration and collapse’, he concluded.
Advances in our technology have brought civilisation to a point where the idea of other beings travelling through space to Earth no longer seems far-fetched or frightening,’ Dr Harrison argues in a special edition of the journal ­Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society devoted to aliens.

People had been getting used to the idea of extra-terrestrials since the Seti (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) project first began listening out for alien radio signals 50 years ago, he said.


Today, surveys suggest that half of the U.S. and Europe believe in aliens, while a ‘substantial proportion’ are convinced alien spacecraft had already visited the Earth.
A second paper in the same journal argued that the discovery of intelligent alien life was unlikely to threaten the world’s faiths.

Ted Peters, theologian at the Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary in Berkeley, California, surveyed 1,300 people of different faiths around the world.
He wrote: ‘It became clear that the vast majority of religious believers, regardless of religion, see no threat to their personal beliefs caused by potential contact with intelligent neighbours on other worlds.’

He also argues that worshippers would be able to accept that heaven would welcome aliens too.

However, elsewhere in the journal, evolution expert Professor Simon Conway Morris, from Cambridge University, said the chances of intelligent alien life were low.
If evolution were the same throughout the universe it would be unthinkable that advanced space travellers in older parts of the universe should not have reached the Earth by now, he said.
Prof Conway Morris added: ‘That did not happen, and it will not happen. We never had any visitors, nor is it worth setting up a reception committee in the hope that one day they might turn up.

‘They are not there, and we are alone.’