THE SEARCH FOR LIFE beyond Earth is already riddled with
conspiracy. Throw some religion in the mix and it’s enough to get people enticed. Several news websites were buzzing with rumors over NASA recently hiring a team of theologians to help predict humanity’s reaction to finding alien life. However, that’s barely half the truth.
While the space agency did provide a grant towards the Center of Theological Inquiry to assess the implications for the hunt for alien life, that research ended four years ago, and the team was never a part of NASA staff.
Instead, efforts to find aliens are still ongoing as scientists scour the cosmos for habitable exoplanets and wait on data beamed down from
rovers on Mars. Just minus the clerics.
HERE’S THE BACKGROUND — This week, rumors spiraled over NASA hiring two dozen experts via the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, New Jersey, which some news outlets referred to as “priests” or “clergy.”
Media outlets claimed that this was part of the space agency’s efforts to understand how people would react to discovering alien life in the cosmos.
Social media users took the news and ran with it, claiming that this foreshadowed what will come in the upcoming year and that aliens would be the next big surprise.
This all stemmed from a
statement released by one of the theologians allegedly involved in the NASA research.
University of Cambridge religious scholar Rev. Dr. Andrew Davison wrote, “Since the evolution of life is clearly not
impossible, and the places where that might happen are probably extraordinarily numerous, there may well be a great deal of life elsewhere ... Religious traditions would be an important feature in how humanity would work through any such confirmation of life elsewhere.”
“Because of that, it features as part of NASA’s ongoing aim to support work on ‘the societal implications of astrobiology’, working with various partner organizations,” the statement continued.
IS IT TRUE? — In 2015, NASA provided $1.1 million in funding to the Center of Theological Inquiry that went towards a program to study the social impact of finding life beyond Earth. The organization sent out a
press release at the time, calling it funding to “convene an interdisciplinary inquiry into the societal implications of the search for life in the universe.”
Not all 24 participants were clergy either. The Center drew from theology, the humanities, and social sciences in their work to study the “societal implications” of “the origins, evolution, distribution, and future of life in the universe.” The funding lasted for two years. While there’s no report on the organization’s website, Davison
wrote a blog post in 2019, “Who knows when, or if, that momentous news will break. If it does, however, we can be sure that it need not catch the Christian intellectual tradition on the back foot.”
And though NASA certainly gave money toward the program, it didn’t go as far as to hire anyone from it. A spokesperson from NASA
told the Associated Press that the researchers involved in the program were never directly employed by the space agency.
“Individuals who receive grant funding from NASA are not employees, advisors, or spokespersons for the agency,” the spokesperson told the AP in an email. “Thus, the researchers and scholars involved with this study were not hired by NASA, but instead received funding through CTI to conduct this work.”
