What new question does the reading and interviews raise for you about the ways in which the discovery of extraterrestrial life could affect human economies, religions, and science? What makes this question difficult to answer?
One question I kept coming back to is how we can avoid assuming that alien life would be anything like us. So much of our search for extraterrestrial intelligence is built around human-centered ideas—how we define intelligence, what we consider communication, and even what qualifies as life. We tend to imagine aliens using sound, symbols, or math to send messages, because that’s how we operate. But what if their way of thinking is completely different from ours? There are only five human senses—what if they communicate through something we can’t even comprehend? Jill Tarter brought up the idea that we might completely overlook a sign of life just because it doesn’t look the way we expect, and that really stuck with me. It made me realize how easy it is to miss something when you're only looking for what feels familiar.
That idea brings up a deeper challenge: can we use human tools—like language, logic, and even science itself—to understand something truly alien? So much of what we know is filtered through a human lens, and we often take for granted that our frameworks are universally valid. But what if they’re not? We might need to rethink not just what we’re looking for, but how we’re even looking. That could mean building new kinds of instruments, using AI not trained on human behavior, or simply being more comfortable with uncertainty and strangeness. I think a big part of this is accepting that we’re not the default.