8 Things That Would Happen If We Made Alien Contact

5. Religion

Although the search for extraterrestrials is a largely (okay, entirely) scientific endeavour, were we ever to actually find those extraterrestrials, it would have all kinds of "spiritual" implications for the human race. This is something that the Brookings Report, a report commissioned by NASA in the 1960s to study the implications of humans in space, took into account. In the footnotes for the report, the need for the world's major religions to have a proper, sit-down think about the impact of aliens on their world views is brought up. Current doctrine is basically anthro- and geo-centric, with little consideration given to the idea that there is anything, let alone life, beyond the Earth (and heaven/hell obvs). What would it mean for, say, fundamentalist Christians, who hold the view that God created the Earth in six days and man was created in his image? If we found another "Earth" with another "man", it would be like suddenly discovering that your dad has a secret family that he takes to football at the weekends and our ideas of how "special" we are would need a serious rethink. That said, religion is a tenacious old beast. Many thinkers reckon that the discovery of extraterrestrials, far from finally killing religion off, would spur on whole new disciplines of Astrotheology and Universal Creationism. Basically, we all become scientologists.