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?
I'm wondering how our notion of "intelligence" might evolve if we discover alien life. The text challenges our human centered view of what counts as "life" showing us Earth's amazing diversity. From creatures that survive radiation like Deinococcus radiodurans to ancient beings like Saccorhytus coronarius that look stranger than anything in sci fi movies
A hard question to answer is this: How would we understand consciousness if aliens process information totally different from our brains? Its difficult because we understand intelligence only through human thinking, problem solving, talking, adapting, but aliens might show group or spread out intelligence completely strange to us. Our habit to put humans at the top of every list could stop us from seeing alien intelligence if it works nothing like what we know; especially if it doesnt fit our definitions of life that the author spends so much time questioning?