Reading the chapter from Kelsey Johnson’s book and watching the PredictionX videos was really informative on the research that goes into extraterrestrial life. It also changed my views on what I thought extraterrestrial life was and what might come from it if we make groundbreaking discoveries in the future. In terms of the book chapter, I thought it was really interesting how Kelsey critiqued our current criteria for what life consists of. It got me thinking about how, if we truly find life that doesn’t necessarily fit our criteria, how will biology as we know it and research shift? I even thought a bit about how, with religion, which emphasizes that humans are unique and one of a kind, how discovering another kind of life might change those interpretations and what that will do to religions in general.
In terms of the videos, Avi Loeb’s video was especially thought-provoking about just how uncertain everything in this universe is. Using the knowledge that we have in the present, and assuming that everything goes to plan or how one would expect it to go based on the current knowledge, we humans can look into the future reasonably okay. But there is always that uncertainty that something might not go to plan, and the predictions that were once made were actually way off from the truth. And it really all comes back to why things regarding some sort of prediction are hard to answer. There will always be extreme uncertainty, and kind of how Kelsey’s book title suggests, we’re always sort of going “into the unknown.”