On April 1, 2026, four astronauts launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a mission to circle the moon and return home.
Artemis II was the first time humans ventured to the moon in more than half a century. From inside their capsule, the crew sent updates, showing images and videos of the four voyagers as their planet Earth got smaller and smaller as they traveled farther from home than any other Earthling had ever before.
On April 6, as the crew swung around the far side of the moon and began the journey home, NASA astronaut Christina Koch radio’d back to Earth with a message from more than a quarter million miles away.
“We will explore, we will build, we will build ships, we will visit again,” she said. “We will construct outposts, we will drive rovers, we will do radio astronomy. We will found companies, we will bolster industry, we will inspire. Ultimately, we will always choose Earth, we will always choose each other."
Koch and her crew had been looking back at Earth, illuminated brightly by our star, the sun, against the blackness of space. For them, there was nothing else out there. The only living things were on the rock where they came from.
Should we uncover evidence of life out there, that crew would be one of the last to ever see our home planet against the blackness of space, knowing that there was nothing – no one – out there.
University of Central Florida planetary scientist Addie Dove thinks that just as the world followed the Artemis II crew mission and rooted for their safe return, humanity would come together in light of a groundbreaking finding of life elsewhere in the universe.
“That kind of unifying thing is what could happen if we have this detection of life elsewhere,” she said. “It's not necessarily hopefully in us versus them, but it's like look at us, and look at where we are. How do we see that as a species, and in sort of the greater context of what else is out there in the universe?”
Her UCF colleague Josh Colwell says such a finding comes with such enormous implications that have the potential to change who we are as humans.
“Recognizing that we're not alone in the universe, that there's other life out there that's developed elsewhere,” he said, there are “huge philosophical and religious implications for such a discovery that I think will affect the sort of human mindset."
In the search for life in the universe, what’s at stake if we find something? How will we reckon with such a profound discovery? Would it change what it means to be human?
“Not one impact”
The wheels of discovery are already in motion.
“This question, ‘are we alone,’ has really transitioned and transformed to the dominant science question in astronomy and astrophysics,” said SETI Institute President and CEO Bill Diamond “It went from sort of a sideshow, like a niche of this area of research, into this is the question everybody's trying to answer."
The first modern attempt to search for life out there began in 1960, and since then has continued to peer deeper into the cosmos and with more precision than ever before. As scientists collect more data about our universe, we’re filling in the blanks of Frank Drake’s equation.
The possibilities of life out there increase with each new day of discovery, and the chances of that finding are getting closer and closer. If we find it, it would be a watershed moment for science. One that would fundamentally change who we are.
“There's not going to be one impact. There's not going to be one way that humanity is affected," said Chelsea Haramia, a senior research fellow at the center for science and thought at the university of Bonn in Germany and co-director of the Discovery and Futures Lab at the SETI Institute.
“We only have one kind of example of life. Evolutionary trajectory of life here on planet Earth. We only have one kind of technology that's detectable at interstellar distances, and that's human technology,” she said. “Life could look very, very different, and so it's just really exciting to think about what we could come to understand potentially if we were to get some real concrete details on the matter.”
I asked the scientists I interviewed for this podcast what they would think of that day. It was hard for them to put it into words, but for the most part, that day would be a happy one. It would be a moment that we answered a question that we had been asking ourselves for centuries. One that would tell us we are not alone in this incredibly large universe.
We would learn that we are not unique — and that’s okay. And that we would come together as one planet, one species, and it would be for the better.
I had a hard time believing that when that day comes it will be all sunshine and rainbows, or milk and honey, or smooth sailing – whatever phrase you want to put there. I am not alone.
What probably my biggest concern would be that the world reacts in a fearful manner, and you know, without any compelling reason to do so, that this is something that people are afraid of,” said Diamond.
However, Diamond told me the public’s response to news stories about Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, or UAPs, and UFOs, has him thinking like that.
“I find that might be unlikely,” he said. “Fourty percent of the American people think that UAPs and UFOs are evidence of advanced technologies in our airspace, and yet they generally don't hear that discussed in a fearful context. Rather, it's a more fascinating and maybe even hopeful context. I don't hear people saying we've got to build a defense network around UFOs and UAPs, because they're scaring the crap out of me.”
The existential threat
People aren’t afraid of the invasion of aliens … at least for now. But fear may come from something bigger than that.
There's a bigger kind of risk, and it's an existential risk. Our existence, as we understand it, is threatened, and will be threatened, as will our assumptions of divinity and religion, but if you can confirm that presence of another being it starts to threaten the kind of assumptions we make about ourselves existentially, and we have an existential crisis.”
Tim Sellnow is a professor of risk and crisis communication at Clemson University. When I reached out to him about this podcast, he said he’s been thinking a lot about what happens after a discovery is made.
“People have known forever that it's possible that there's life beyond what we can see in our solar system, but what does it mean to actually find evidence and share that evidence?”
People have been thinking about this for a very long time.
“It surprises people that the ancient Greeks were talking about alien life, but they were,” said Joe Packer, a professor of communication at Central Michigan University who studies how people have historically talked about alien life.
He explains that conversation began with a group of philosophers called atomists.
They basically said all of life was composed of these little atoms, they're infinite, they're all over the place, they're manifesting in infinite or near infinite combinations, and because of this, we should expect that there are other planets. On these other planets, there are other life forms that are sort of like us, he said
The atomists were “having these debates about what is the nature of our earth, what is it made out of,” he said. “This idea that the matter of our planet is not unique. It’s just these atoms and we can expect it elsewhere.”
Even in the days of Plato, we were questioning our uniqueness. Our aloneness in the cosmos. And now thousands of years later, we very well could get an answer to those questions.
So what happens next?
“I think when you have this sort of an existential crisis where we attach uncertainty to something you're going to seek information,” said Sellnow. “You’re going to want evidence But then you're also going to have questions of — and that is — the greater kind of question that is going to be answered by theology or religious figures. What does it mean to be human? What does this say about God’s plan? What do I do with this? What does this mean for me? How do I see myself in this universe?"
A collapse of faith?
A popular assumption when it comes to the confirmation of extraterrestrial life is that religion and faith institutions will collapse. But that doesn’t appear to be the case.
Religious scholars find that idea comes from media narratives and anti-religious commentary and not from empirical evidence or religious people themselves.
Jennifer Wiseman is a NASA astronomer and the former director of the Program of Dialog on Science Ethics and Religion for the American Association of the Advancement of Science
Now my experience is that faith communities of various stripes that I’ve interacted with are very interested in what we're discovering about the universe, and they find the possibility that there might be life beyond Earth to be delightful, actually,” she said. “They might have to expand or broaden their imagination a little bit. But they have, for most of the cases, people [who] have no problem incorporating this idea into the idea that however they believe life began on planet Earth, that God or the creator could have done something on a much bigger scale. And that would be just fine.”
There is empirical evidence that backs that up. Ted Peters is a retired professor at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkley, California. He studies the relationships between religion and natural sciences. In fact, he helped create the field known as astrotheology — the study of how astrobiology impacts faith — including one interesting study from 2008.
"We asked people who are self-identified as religious to answer 10 questions, some of which were like, 'Well, if we could confirm the existence of an intelligent off-Earth civilization, would your faith beliefs face a crisis? Would your religious tradition collapse?' 80 to 90% of people said, 'No, I don't have a problem,” he said.
Peters wasn’t surprised bu the results. He is an ordained pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. With that background, I asked him, how does the idea of life on another planet square with Christian teachings and beliefs?
“These are the deeper questions that really do need to be genuinely explored. Just briefly on the survey, there was room for comments,” he said. “We got again and again and again. It didn't matter whether you're fundamentalists or Roman Catholic or mainline Protestant. This universe is so big, and God is so big, and the creation is so big. Of course, we share it with other creatures by God. Let me tell you that was the general tenor of this.”
Peters recognizes the constraints of this research, like the fact that this survey was conducted in 2008 – and it’s probably time for another. Still, Steve Engel, Rabbi emeritus of the Congregation of Reform Judaism, is hearing similar sentiments in the Jewish faith, even today.
It's just proof that God is so big that it can encompass something outside of ourselves,” he said. “We need to make a connection, because you always hear, ‘Oh, we're all God's creation,’ right? Well, this is extrapolating that concept.
“We would have to accept whoever or whatever that intelligent being was outside of ourselves, because it's all part of God's creation, so we couldn't fight it, we couldn't, you know, try to take control of it, because it would be just as important as a part of God's creation as we are. It would be one of God's creatures.”
The Islamic faith has similar teachings, said Jörg Matthias Determann, a historian based at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar.
“The opening of the Quran and various other passages describe God as the Lord of the Worlds – worlds in the plural,” he said. “The Arabic phrase only ever appears in the Quran in the plural. It never appears in the singular. So in general the text here is very open to the possibility that there is life out there."
Peters’ study found these findings weren’t just from those three faith groups.
“We didn't run into a single religious tradition that's going to face a problem. The Buddhists were the most interested because it was 100% There wasn't even one Buddhist respondent who thought that a religious crisis was nigh,” he said.
“The only people who talked about a religious crisis were those who are self-identified as non-religious. They said we don't have a problem, but those religious people are going to have a problem,” said Peters. “I just don't, on this basis, foresee a religious crisis on the horizon.”
But these are very broad strokes and religious groups are not monolithic. Engel explains while he belongs to the more progressive group, there are others within the Jewish faith like fundamentalists who might not be as welcoming to the discovery of alien life.
“The way that this relates to science is that when you're [a] fundamentalist, you see the Bible as the truth, and you see that as God's word, and you see science as human created,” he said. “When there's a conflict between science and religion, as a fundamentalist, religion always wins out, and so fundamentalists also reject a lot of science because they say it contradicts what's said in the Bible, what's said by a religious perspective.”
So there could be a crisis of religion, or humanity. Or both.
"Would it humble us? Would it make us arrogant?,” asked Engel. “Religion is based upon the human being being the center of the universe and being the most important creature that God created, and boy, would that be a change if we found something else?"
A transformation of humanity
In writing this episode I kept coming back to my conversation with philosopher Chelsea Haramia. She told me that a finding like this could change our sense of who we are.
I asked her: How would this happen?
This is the kind of situation where you face a transformative choice. It's big – and you know it's big – but you don't actually know what you will be like on the other side of that choice,” she explained. “The fictional, mythical example is suppose you were asked to become a vampire. Do you want to become a vampire? You know if you were to become a vampire all your core preferences and values would change. How do you decide rationally to make that choice now as a human being?”
This comes from the writing of another philosopher, L.A. Paul, who says these personal individual transformational events happen in our lives already. We become a parent. We move to another country.
We don’t know what is on the other side when we make that choice.
“There's a problem of rationally preparing for what you will be, and so that is the kind of thing that I believe can happen at the collective level,” she said. “Other people think this too: that collective transformations are possible, that collective shifts can happen, and it can change what it means to be maybe a member of a group, or even what it means to be a member of humanity.
But in order for that transformation to happen, people need to understand what we’ve found.
How do we tell the world we’ve found life somewhere else in the universe? And will people even believe it?
