Impact of extraterrestrial life discovery for third world societies: Anthropological and public health considerations

In this chapter we focus on the strategies developed by humans, living around the world, to prevent the injuries and death that can occur when confronted by random, but not totally unanticipated disasters. While the occurrence of events such as tsunamis, floods, volcanic eruptions, drought, and hostility from a distant tribe may be forgotten, the ancestral memory of these events, and strategies for coping with them, are retained in such things as stories and rituals. These seemingly unimportant cultural strategies made it possible for individuals to respond to such events with immediate and appropriate actions, thus providing those people with significant survival advantages. We begin by outlining some of the strategies honed by humans over centuries and millennia that proved to be successful in responding to potentially threatening events and that informed future generations about these events and the strategies needed to address them. These strategies, which continue to be practiced in traditional groups, include the use of such things as stories, parables, song and dance. We then apply this thinking to develop a research design for studying the response of individuals living in developing countries to information about possible contact with extraterrestrial complex or intelligent life. We conclude this chapter by outlining a justification for such a study.