Reading through both the interview transcripts got me thinking: What if our search for extraterrestrial signals reveals more about our own stubborn limitations than about any aliens out there?
On the one hand, among many of us, there's the hopeful view that finding a signal (those elusive “frequency” or “time compression” bursts we expect from our technology) could unify us as “Earthlings” and break down our differences. Then, during the discussion with Jill Tarter, Professor Goodman half-jokingly said, “Clearly that’s alien technology” when talking about curious anomalies like Amoamua, and mentioned that Avi Loeb even wrote a paper suggesting we take these oddities seriously. That moment got me thiking: if we do spot something that’s unmistakably out of the ordinary, could our deep-rooted scientific assumptions and cultural biases actually cause us to dismiss or even change the truth, just to keep things familiar?
This question is hard to answer because it forces us to face our own resistance to change. And with change, one can never be certain whether it would be a positive or a negative one. While Tarter’s words inspire a vision of what might happen if we embrace the discovery and evolve as one people, Loeb’s perspective introduces a dose of reality: our methods and traditions might blind us to the truly transformative. And, when compared to the car that passes by on the street, there are too many details that we might not think of (maybe because the system we plan to apply is fully working for Earth but not for the Sun, but we don’t know about it) when exploring something new. If our instruments are tuned to only see what we expect, then even a genuine alien signal might get swept aside as another anomaly to be “explained” away. It feels like the real challenge isn’t just finding extraterrestrial life—it’s about whether we’re brave enough to let that discovery shake up everything we thought we knew about ourselves.
I think it’s a problem not just with astrophysics, but with all science in general. However, I also don’t know if it’s possible to be eliminated fully.