NASA Hired Dozens of Religious Leaders to Study Humanity's Possible Reaction to News of Alien Life

As the world's leading space exploration agency, NASA has spent quite a sizable amount on various missions throughout the decades-old history of the outfit. One of those missions—or experiments, if you will—involved the consultation of 24 theologians NASA enlisted from around the world. The task at hand? To determine how the world's religions would react should humanity find out alien life does, in fact, exist out amongst the stars.

The research was first brought to light by religious scholar Reverand Andrew Davison, a member of the staff at the University of Cambridge. Davison shared a blog post on the university's Faculty of Divinity blog last week, revealing he was a member of the project. The scholar also has a book due out next year, Astrobiology and Christian Doctrine, looking at his time as part of the study.

The project in question actually took place in 2016 as Davison and others assembled at Princeton's Center for Theological Inquiry. As it turns out, the group ultimately suggested not much would change if an announcement was made.

"The headline findings are that adherents of a range of religious traditions report that they can take the idea in their stride," Davison says in his forthcoming book. The Times UK, the first to obtain a copy of Davison's book, also confirms a rabbi, an imam, and another Anglican preist Christian, Jewish, and Islamic doctrines would "be fine" if alien life was discovered.

Interestingly enough, the new breaks just days after NASA and other joint space agencies successfullly launched the James Webb Space Telescope into the cosmos, another move some researchers believe needed to happen before they would be able to find definitive proof of alien life.