85 years ago radio began to panic. Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater group turned on the microphones of CBS’ North American studios to announce that the world was being invaded by aliens. It had everything to be true. For almost an hour, the radio simulated reports and testimonies from the field, the opinion of commentators and confirmation from experts. It was all a radio adaptation of the science fiction novel “The War of the Worlds” by HG Wells. The episode gave Orson Wells prominence as a playwright, but left many listeners convinced that they shouldn’t believe everything that comes on the radio.
heard by TSFMiguel Crespo, researcher at CIES-ISCTE explains that the essential thing about this formula is having a good script: “A good story, even if it is not true, and even if it is later denied, will endure much more easily than a story that is true, but not so interesting.”
“In this case, the listeners assimilated the content without context. And, therefore, they were watching fiction, but assuming that it was reality, that it was news, or journalistic information,” explains Miguel Crespo.
CBS had six million listeners. Three million only tuned in to the radio after the introduction, which explained that what was going to happen next was an adaptation of a novel. At least 1.2 million people believed the story was a real chapter in their lives. Of them, half a million were sure that danger was imminent. On October 30, 1938, listeners panicked, overloaded phone lines and blocked traffic to escape the aliens.
Eighty-five years later, with “more technology”, but only half a dose of “media literacy”, the ability to deceive remains: “It seems to me that today it would be even easier than in the past. We see large media outlets to manipulate people constantly and on topics much more worrying than a Martian invasion,” considers Miguel Crespo.
“This episode [de Orson Wells] It is a prelude to current times. It is difficult to distinguish what is reality from what is fiction. It is difficult to distinguish what is news from what is just a creative construction,” highlights CIES-ISCTE researcher Miguel Crespo.
This is where journalism and astrophysics come together. From the hand of Rui Agostinho, former director of the Lisbon Astronomical Observatory, also came clarifying stories that needed to be verified: “I even did some calculations from someone who told me that there was a spaceship in that photograph. I did all the trigonometry, from the position, to see that, most likely, that object was a bird of prey in height.”
But creativity doesn’t just paint the space. TO TSF, Astrophysics and Space Sciences researcher Rui Agostinho has no doubt that “there is life out there.” It remains to be seen if he is “intelligent” and able to “travel.”
“Absolutely, yes. There is life out there. But life has to evolve and become intelligent. And only then, with intelligence, is it able to develop technology to be able to travel in space. And traveling in space is extremely complicated,” he explains. the researcher Rui Agostinho.
“It takes time and stable conditions on the planet for life to evolve and become intelligent. And that’s not immediate. Now, of course, the universe has been around for a long time. Galaxies began 13 billion years ago. There are stars long before ours, which had planets, and where life also evolved. Intelligent life on our planet is relatively recent in this entire history. So, ultimately, yes, the universe has the conditions for, a long time ago , in other places, have allowed the development of intelligent life,” he concludes.
Source: TSF
