Speaking of life beyond the confines of our pile of dirt, what will it mean to the world if and when we DO find extraterrestrial life? There’s a lot of talk about how the very idea of it will be so mind-numbingly astonishing for humanity that we’ll all instantly unite against (or towards) a common enemy (or goal). The idea of countries will fall away and we’ll quickly enter a new renaissance in which we all come together as the species homo sapiens and work towards bettering and augmenting ourselves to enable greater participation in the happenings o four galactic neighborhood (you know, like interstellar HOA meetings and whatnot).
As much as I’d love to believe in the ideal that Star Trek envisioned, where money somehow doesn’t exist, you can just have anything you want or need by having the printer make it for you, and we’re all working and contributing to society out of the sheer shared responsibility of it all… I don’t think that’s likely to happen. I think it will all largely depend on what kind of first contact we make. Given the emptiness of our immediate surroundings, and the state and trajectory of technology, impressive as it may be, I think our first indication of life will be the impression of it. Meaning, the scanning of distant rocky world, evaluating it’s frequencies across the visible and invisible spectrum, ascertaining what it’s atmosphere is made out of, and making some logical leaps to determine that this distant mote of dust in the night sky MUST also contain life, because it’s air is a similar combination of elements as are, and we know that ours isn’t stable without the regeneration of trees and fauna breathing back and forth at each other, and plate tectonics churning and regurgitating used minerals into new over and over again. The scientists will proclaim that they’ve finally found life, and we will be briefly amazed and glance up at the night sky to wonder if they know about us, too… and then back to episodes of Love On The Spectrum (not a complaint).