I don’t think that the discovery will cahnge too much. It will simply mean that there is a much greater possibility for life elsewhere. Whether it is sentient, self-conscious or not, is a question that a telescope probably cannot answer.

I still have an old science magazine of 1985-6, with a beautiful cover that showed two astronauts’ faces on a reddish background: on ones’ helmet was the letters CCCP, on the other one’s the letters USA. The magazine had the headline “1992: Joint American-Russian Mission to Mars”.

But I think in the future we’ll see the private industry taking the place of state agencies in the business of space exploration, with of course all the good and bad that comes from it (remember that first lines of the movie “Fight Club”? Planet Starbucks and the Microsoft Galaxy… ugh!)

Why not the will? Frankly, I think because we don’t have a pressing-enough URGE, and urges always come from necessity.

If our scientists were to discover that an asteroid would hit the Earth in 50 years, I suspect NASA would find an increase in their budgets of 10-fold.

Sure, there’s global warming, and I for one think our generation is going to experience particularly interesting times (interesting like in the way the chinese curse); but nevertheless there is not a global enough consensus that we have to leave this planet in a haste.

And frankly, we really don’t yet know just how abundant or extremely rare Earth-like planets that contain liquid water are. Maybe they are extremely scarce, which would strenghthen the argument of ETH proponents, when dealing with the question of why in the hell would so many civilizations should find our little corner of the Galaxy so damn interesting.