I'm especially curious about the economics of interspecies contact: might encountering extraterrestrial life lead to the development of completely new commodities, markets, and economic theories that go beyond the current capitalism-socialism divide? According to my research, there are already a lot of conflicts between religious organizations and scientific advancement, and they would probably get worse if extraterrestrial life started to exist in our world. The political-economic model outlined demonstrates the intricate interactions between religious convictions and scientific progress that impact economic expansion, suggesting that extraterrestrial contact may lead to both a spiritual and an unparalleled economic restructuring. Furthermore, even among Earth's biologists, our very notion of "life" is controversial, as Johnson points out, raising the possibility that extraterrestrial biological beings could contradict established scientific classifications in ways that alter religious cosmologies and the distribution of economic resources.
What makes these questions particularly difficult to answer is our complete lack of historical precedent for such contact, combined with profound uncertainty about what form extraterrestrial life might take. The potential cultural impact of extraterrestrial contact would vary dramatically based on the alien civilization's "level of technological advancement, degree of benevolence or malevolence, and level of mutual comprehension". Historical analogies like the Columbian Exchange suggest potentially catastrophic outcomes for the less technologically advanced civilization. Moreover, Johnson's excerpt highlights our anthropocentric biases in defining life itself, challenging us to imagine organisms that might "develop in the universe under radically different conditions." This conceptual limitation prevents us from accurately modeling economic, religious, or scientific responses to truly alien forms of existence. Would we recognize non-carbon-based intelligence as "alive"? Would religious doctrines expand to include beings whose evolution occurred entirely outside Earth's divine narrative? These fundamentally unanswerable questions reveal the limits of our current intellectual frameworks.