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?
Response: After the reading and interviews, I’m honestly wondering: would the discovery of extraterrestrial life even matter for our economies, practices, religions, etc.? The reason I pose this question is I cannot help but notice how unlikely any discovery of an ET force is: the Johnson book says that “the chances of there currently being another advanced broadcasting situation in the Milky Way are in the range of roughly 1 in 10,000.” In the interview with Jill Tarter, I also felt that the plans that us humans have for interfacing with ETs should we find them (which Prof. Goodman does ask about) was quite preliminary. Instead, the NASA “post-detection” protocol revolves around making sure that we really have found ETs. However, I am unsure that even if we detect life outside of ourselves, there is a reasonable way to communicate with these lives, we can understand them, etc. From my understanding, this makes me feel like there’s an extremely low-probability that we interact with ETs in an intelligible enough way to have them change out economies, religions, and science. From my opinion, humans will be so skeptical of such an event and life force that failing to confirm ETs' existence will completely obscure any effects.
This question is difficult to answer because it seems nearly impossible to reduce our level of uncertainty based off of the data that we reasonably have at our disposal. We learned about epistemic uncertainty, and that we can reduce it by refining and improving our models that make predictions. But, is there any way to reduce epistemic uncertainty re: the likelihood of conversing with other life forms? The level of randomness and uncertainty is unbearably high. On the other hand, I think that other related questions we could ask are extremely complex. For example, we might ask how elastic the human population is to shifting its axioms (e.g. economies, religions, and science) after a life-shifting event — but can we even draw parallels to previous examples? And how much can we reasonably extrapolate based off of certain case studies? To conclude, I’m puzzled after these interviews and the reading if contact with ETs could even change our fundamental human behavior and assumptions, and it seems even more difficult to begin answering that question.