Reading and listening to the interviews this week raised lots of deeply interesting and perplexing questions for me. The Johnson reading highlighted how even the search for life beyond Earth forces us to confront our assumptions about our uniqueness in the universe. Then, I found it pretty uplifting to hear Jill Tarter's optimistic take: that the act of listening for other civilizations can unify humanity under a shared identity as "earthlings", potentially dissolving some of our boundaries. Finally, I enjoyed hearing that contact with extraterrestrial intelligence may force scientists to expand their frameworks from Avi Loeb. Putting it all together, to me, these perspectives nodded to the possibility that such a discovery would not just generate awe, but also force institutions—religious, economic, and scientific—to change (or, rather, adapt) in fundamental ways.
To me, the speculation about all of the unknowns (particularly the 'unknown unknowns') is what makes this question so perplexing and difficult to answer. How can we reliably make a prediction matrix for how humans (writ large) may react to a totally unprecedented event? Surely different people would react in different ways, colored by their cultural, political, and spiritual backgrounds. I do think that the economic changes may be the most feasibly predictable ones: whole new industries would emerge and grow, based on interstellar communication, planetary defense, space exploration, etc.. I do think that many religious systems could be thrown into crisis––does the existence of other life threaten that certain groups are not, in fact, the creator's "chosen people"? Or, on the contrary, does it serve as validation, proving that humanity is special in its role in the universe, as the sole believers? Would the aliens have religioin at all, and if so, would it resemble our own? As we can already see, answering the one big question (is there other life) only prompts me with thousands more. This ambiguity makes this likely the most fascinating but elusive question of our lifetimes.