The interviews with Drs. Jill Tarter and Avi Loeb pushed me to think about the ramifications that any verified discovery of extraterrestrial (intelligent) life would have on religious, cultural, and secular beliefs on the centrality of humans and the ‘natural’ predominance of their needs over the needs of other creatures and forms of life we currently share the Earth with. How would religions reframe doctrines that currently center human purpose and legacy on this Earth alone, and how would they position life in space as relative to God’s dominion, i.e., is it part of it or something separate, would alien/extraterrestrial life forms be considered of ‘man’, Adam, etc. Furthermore, in terms of secular beliefs on utilitarianism and efforts to maximize either social or personal welfare or some spectrum in between, how would resource allocation change in response to the discovery of life beyond the Earth; especially given the current trend in many developed nations where defense budgets often exceed that allocated to social programs? I think these questions will be difficult to answer because they force us to consider why we, meaning humans and our representative entities, have assumed superiority and hegemony over other beings we co-inhabit the Earth with and the fragility of this assumption (human exceptionalism perhaps) in the light of the possibility of there being other intelligent life forms which may function like, or better, than us.
These questions also challenge us to confront our predictive power, as Dr. Tarter noted, we are searching in complete uncertainty regarding investigations into the existence of other civilizations outside of human history. This implies that almost all research in the field relies on informed speculation rather than precedent being used to project into the future. There also lies a layer of challenge in how deeply #human economic and cultural traditions are - because they are so deeply entwined with the human lived experience, it is difficult to take an economic theory or cultural value and extrapolate it to a social simulation to examine how people might react, for example, after contact with extraterrestrial life is made.