Introduction

After framing the problems of discovery and impact, and attempting to transcend our anthropocentric conceptions of life in the last two sections, we now turn to the possible implications of discovering life beyond Earth. As the reader may gather from what has already been said, great caution and humility are in order here, as we seek to push the frontiers of knowledge using the tools of the social sciences, humanities, philosophy, and theology, not to mention cognitive science and evolutionary science as well.

NASA engineer, biologist, and philosopher Mark Lupisella begins this section with a very broad look at the philosophical implications of life in the universe, emphasizing a peculiar activity of sufficiently self-aware beings: the pursuit of value. The awareness of self and of other minds leads to theories of mind, he argues, as well as the practical pursuit of what is valuable, as embodied in the fields of ethics and aesthetics. Both biological evolution and cosmic evolution affect our pursuit of values – and presumably the pursuit of values by other beings in the universe, if indeed they pursue value at all (a fundamental question fraught with implications for our interactions with them). These factors are important for preparing for contact, and Lupisella elaborates ten practical considerations from this point of view.

In the next two chapters two philosophers ponder the seemingly inscrutable problem of alien minds. Philosopher of science Michael Ruse approaches the problem from the viewpoint of the history and philosophy of evolutionary biology, his specialty over a career spanning 50 years. Through an analysis of the classic science fiction movie The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), he examines possible alien outlooks on mathematics and logic, science, morality, and religion, concluding that the differences in all those areas compared to ours could be very considerable. This conclusion resonates with those of the previous section urging us to transcend anthropocentrism in our most fundamental concepts. Philosopher of mind Susan Schneider takes a very different approach, illustrating how various disciplines can view the same problem from distinct points of view, with divergent outcomes. Taking theories of consciousness and Nick Bostrom's recent book Superintelligence (Bostrom, 2014) as her starting point, Schneider argues that alien minds may well not be biological, but postbiological, what she terms superintelligent artificial intelligence.