In a July 2015 Nature commentary, Swedish physicist Jan Conrad urged colleagues to tighten requirements for declaring breakthroughs. Citing, for example, the famously false news that neutrinos might have exceeded the speed of light, he warned of consequences from “broadcasting seemingly extraordinary results to peers and the public before they are reviewed, or despite knowing that better data are just around the corner.” But what about results that are peer-reviewed, worthy to be announced, yet likely to inspire—or maybe incite—misleading enthusiasm and overstatement?
It’s great for science outreach that some among the press and the public adore to engage questions about life elsewhere than Earth. Along those lines, a recent news incident involving the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) fits the pattern that Conrad indicted. The incident caused the Special Astrophysical Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences to issue a short, sober statement that began, “On August 30, 2016 there appeared a number of reports in different mass media on possible detection of a radio signal … associated with the activity of an extraterrestrial civilization; in this connection, we consider it necessary to make official comments.” The statement killed the wayward news story by announcing that although this “interesting radio signal” had indeed been detected, “subsequent processing and analysis … revealed its most probable terrestrial origin.”
But what about the nearly simultaneous media reaction to the peer-reviewed, eminently announcement-worthy Nature article “A terrestrial planet candidate in a temperate orbit around Proxima Centauri”? That paper presents itself without journalistic extravagance—though maybe it inevitably and unintentionally invites the extravagance that arrived anyway.
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