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The interviews—but primarily the reading—got me thinking about how the discovery of extraterrestrial life could reshape our sense of identity and our place in the universe. Johnson’s point about how limited and Earth-centered our definitions of life are made me wonder how we would respond emotionally and culturally to life that looks or behaves nothing like us. Would we be excited, scared, or in denial? Could it perhaps even inspire awe? This is a difficult question for me to answer, but I’d love to explore it further in class. Much of our science, religion, and daily lives are built on the assumption that we are unique. Discovering that we aren’t alone could be deeply unsettling. Personally, I would still rather know. I believe that if extraterrestrial beings exist, the risks they pose would be present whether we know about them or not—so it’s better to be informed and prepared. And thinking more optimistically, we could learn a great deal from them.

The search for extraterrestrial life is an exciting one full of uncertainty. I was actually first surprised by the level of effort in this field, for there is such a high probability you may spend years and find nothing. Worse so, not because there are no other advanced communicative civilizations in the milky way, but because we have no definitive way to actually detect them. The leading way at the moment is to take advantage of the fact that space is mostly hydrogen, and that this frequency has typical very little natural activity. In fact, the whole terrestrial micro range has very little activity. Therefore, we are looking for radio waves and signals that we believe to be unnatural. If one occurs, we assume that it must be a civilization producing it, not necessarily to speak to us but just in general. This is definitely more scientific than I had assumed a search for aliens might look like, and it is quite promising. However, it is not entirely accurate, as seen with the false positives, and relies heavily on a chain of assumptions, and the major assumption that in a tiny knowledge of the universe on Earth, we can derive knowledge of all natural vs unnatural frequencies. From the Drake equation to the frequency analysis, uncertainty seems to be the defining characteristic of this field, but the level of it is decreasing, which is encouraging.

I'm especially curious about the economics of interspecies contact: might encountering extraterrestrial life lead to the development of completely new commodities, markets, and economic theories that go beyond the current capitalism-socialism divide? According to my research, there are already a lot of conflicts between religious organizations and scientific advancement, and they would probably get worse if extraterrestrial life started to exist in our world. The political-economic model outlined demonstrates the intricate interactions between religious convictions and scientific progress that impact economic expansion, suggesting that extraterrestrial contact may lead to both a spiritual and an unparalleled economic restructuring. Furthermore, even among Earth's biologists, our very notion of "life" is controversial, as Johnson points out, raising the possibility that extraterrestrial biological beings could contradict established scientific classifications in ways that alter religious cosmologies and the distribution of economic resources. What makes these questions particularly difficult to answer is our complete lack of historical precedent for such contact, combined with profound uncertainty about what form extraterrestrial life might take. The potential cultural impact of extraterrestrial contact would vary dramatically based on the alien civilization's "level of technological advancement, degree of benevolence or malevolence, and level of mutual comprehension". Historical analogies like the Columbian Exchange suggest potentially catastrophic outcomes for the less technologically advanced civilization. Moreover, Johnson's excerpt highlights our anthropocentric biases in defining life itself, challenging us to imagine organisms that might "develop in the universe under radically different conditions." This conceptual limitation prevents us from accurately modeling economic, religious, or scientific responses to truly alien forms of existence. Would we recognize non-carbon-based intelligence as "alive"? Would religious doctrines expand to include beings whose evolution occurred entirely outside Earth's divine narrative? These fundamentally unanswerable questions reveal the limits of our current intellectual frameworks.