But intelligent life could make giant lasers or radio transmitters, so you might be able to hear them from farther away,' Shostak said. 'Microbes can make oxygen in the atmosphere. And even though there's probably far less intelligent life in the universe than there is microbial life, intelligent extraterrestrials could potentially broadcast their presence over much greater distances.

SETI scans the skies daily for radio signals that might be produced by forms of intelligent life. However, even though microbes may well be the first 'aliens' that we'll encounter, that doesn't rule out the possibility of detecting intelligent extraterrestrial communications, Shostak told Live Science. And it just makes sense that if there's something out there that it'd be microbial.' 'Those who are paying attention know how much habitable real estate is out there. 'With all the news about exoplanets, people are primed for this,' Wall said. Today, an announcement about discovering extraterrestrial microbes is far more likely to promote fascination than panic, he said. A stronger possibility is that our first encounter with alien life will be through finding microbes from other worlds, which are far more likely to be common across all the cosmos than intelligent organisms, said Wall, who is a senior writer at Live Science's sister site. An improbable number of variables would have to fall into place for that to happen. Alien microbes, not alien monstersĪ militaristic alien attack would involve extraterrestrials that are not only intelligent and technically advanced, but who also know that humans exist and can travel to our solar system, Wall told Live Science. In fact, the violent episode Welles described is by far the least likely scenario for how humans might first encounter extraterrestrial life, according to science writer Michael Wall, author of 'Out There: A Scientific Guide to Alien Life, Antimatter and Human Space Travel (For the Cosmically Curious)' (Grand Central Publishing, Nov. All this suggested that if we did have intelligent cosmic company in the universe, it wasn't on Mars - or even in our solar system, he explained. 'Certainly, by the late 1930s, no one believed it.There was increasing knowledge from astronomers: Mars has a very thin atmosphere there's not much oxygen we don't see any liquid water on the surface,' Shostak said. While radio listeners may have fallen for the tale of a Martian invasion, space scientists of the day were already well aware that Mars wasn't capable of harboring a thriving civilization of intelligent aliens, Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer with the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI) in California, told Live Science. (Image credit: New York Daily News Archive/Getty) On October 31, 1938, the front page of the New York newspaper the Daily News noted the panic sparked by Welles' broadcast.

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