This is the question Michael Varnum wants to answer. Varnum is a psychology professor at Arizona State University and a member of the school’s Interplanetary Initiative, a space-exploration research project. Microscopic organisms don’t make for good alien villains, but our chances of discovering extraterrestrial microbial life seem better than encountering advanced alien civilizations, Varnum says. In recent years, more and more scientists have begun to suspect that microbes may exist on moons in our solar system, in the subsurface oceans of Europa and Enceladus and the methane lakes of Titan.

“There’s a bit of a giggle factor to this,” Varnum says of his work.“But I’m actually getting a sense that there’s less of a giggle factor than maybe a decade or two ago.”

Varnum and his colleagues at ASU recently conducted several experiments to try to gauge how people would react to news of microbial life elsewhere in the universe. The results, they concluded, suggest people might actually take it pretty well.

In multiple studies, Varnum and his team ran different kinds of text through software that detects and analyzes positive and negative affect in language. One batch included media reports about space-related news: the discovery of mysterious cosmic objects called pulsars in 1967, the detection of the unexplained “Wow!” radio signal in 1977, a Martian meteorite reported to have fossilized microbes in 1996, and the strange flickering of a distant star, first revealed in 2015, that sparked speculation about alien megastructures.

Another batch included essays written by U.S.-based participants that described how they would react to news of the discovery of extraterrestrial microbial life, and how they thought the rest of the world would react. Another batch included written responses to either a New York Times article about the Martian meteorite or a Times article about synthetic life being created in a laboratory. Yet another set included news coverage about a more recent event, last year’s discovery of ‘Oumuamua, the first known interstellar object in our solar system.

In every case, the text-analysis software showed that people, journalists and non-journalists alike, seemed to exhibit more positive than negative emotions in response to news of extraterrestrial microbes.

People felt more positively about microbial life outside of Earth than they did about human-made life generated in the lab. The researchers didn’t find any variation in responses based on the personality traits, political beliefs, income, and other demographic factors they asked participants to report. (Varnum and his team also found that people felt their fellow Americans would be less happy about the news than they would—a product of the tendency among Americans to think they’re better than the average person, he says.) Varnum recently presented these findings at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.