Depends on who comes forward with the discovery.

Scientists - prizes and medals.
Normal dude - loony bin

I was just taking a break from some school work and got to thinking about what would happen if we found concrete evidence of life on another planet or a moon. I'm not talking about aliens with space ships or ray guns but simply single celled organisms. It would prove that we aren't alone in the universe in the terms of life, strengthen the theory that more complex life exists somewhere out in the distances of space and force us all to reflect deeply about our place in the grand scheme of things. Would we humans gain a healthier perspective as to our differences? Would we stop fighting? How would religion or spirituality change? How would our perceptions of our own history change?

I thought I'd share with you guys and see what you think would change, if anything. So, what would happen if we found life out there?

Also, life doesn't necessarily have to be carbon based. It could also be, say, Silicon which widens the horizons even more for the idea of life outside of Earth.

I agree. I always cringe when I hear scientists say that you have to have water to have life. It seems to me that you would just need some sort of liquid flowing through the organism in order to transport nutrients. Why can’t that be liquid methane in an organism with a silicon based body?

In spite of this, I would rather that we discover carbon-based life forms that depend on water, because that’s probably the only kind of alien life form that WE CAN EAT!!!

I had an interesting thought. Isolationism is usually the best political policy, so i guess contact is a bad thing. At some point we could find ourselves as adversaries(and over a few million milleniums or so, this is a strong possibility). Not trying to be negative, but contact has traditionally not ended well for one of the party's, historically speaking.

Isolationism is usually the best political policy.