14 DAY TRIAL // The United Nations is about to appoint an ambassador for alien affairs, who will be in charge of greeting extraterrestrial visitors when and if they come to Earth.
The organization is very likely to propose that astrophysicist Mazlan Othman takes this position. Her main responsibilities will be to initiate contact with our visitors, and to greet them firsthand.
The expert will also be in charge of coordinating our response to the visit, and on conducting all aspects of any potential preparations to accommodate or handle dialogues with the aliens.
Othman, a 58-year-old Malaysian scientist, believes that discovering alien life is becoming increasingly certain, given the hundreds of extrasolar planets discovered in the last decade alone.
The chances of planets similar to ours existing out there are increasing with each discovery, and Othman is not alone in believing that some of those exoplanets may be populated by intelligent life.
“The continued search for extraterrestrial communication, by several entities, sustains the hope that some day human kind will received signals from extraterrestrials,” the scientist said recently.
“When we do, we should have in place a coordinated response that takes into account all the sensitivities related to the subject,” adds Othman, who is also the head of the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA).
“The UN is a ready-made mechanism for such coordination,” she added, saying that a number of UN scientific advisory committees are bound to discuss whether to transform the UNOOSA into a body that can handle alien visits.
“[Ms] Othman is absolutely the nearest thing we have to a 'take me to your leader' person,” says the head of the UK delegation to the UN committee, professor Richard Crowther.
But not everyone agrees that we should be so quick to receive any potential visitors with open arms. Leading the opposition is esteemed theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking.
He warned this April that aliens who visit our world may be more interested in our resources than in our art, culture, life style and other things that make us human.
As such, he said at the time, we would do well to keep away from radio telescopes, which can send messages deep into space, where they can be picked up, Daily Mail reports.