How to redesign life to make it alien

Here’s something to chew on during a pandemic. Forget bat viruses, if alien viruses from outer space existed, could they infect us?

Viruses on Earth are parasites that can infect living hosts and hijack their resources to make new viruses because “Earth-hosts” are compatible. This is because all life evolved on the planet from common ancestors using variations of the same chemistry. But if there were alien parasites adapted to different alien hosts, they might be so different from Earth life that they’d be completely mismatched to it.

We have not yet discovered life outside of Earth, of course. But …