This article was originally published on The conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com Expert Voices: Opinions and Insights.
We are only half way through 2023 and it already feels like the year of extraterrestrial contact.
In February, President Joe Biden gave orders to shoot down three unidentified aerial phenomena – NASA’s title for UFOs. Then the alleged leaked images of a UFO Navy pilot, and then news of a whistleblower report on a possible U.S. government cover-up of UFO research. Recently an independent analysis published in June suggests that UFOs may have been collected by a clandestine agency of the US government.
If any actual evidence of extraterrestrial life emerges, whether through whistleblower testimony or the admission of a cover-up, people would face a historic paradigm shift.
As members of an Indigenous Studies working group who were asked to make our disciplinary expertise available to a workshop affiliated with the Berkeley SETI Research Centerwe have studied centuries of cultural contacts and their results from around the world. Our joint preparations for the workshop were based on transdisciplinary research in Australia, New Zealand, Africa and across the Americas.
In its final form, our group statement illustrated the need for diverse perspectives on the ethics of listening to extraterrestrial life and broadening it what defines ‘intelligence’ and ‘life’. Based on our findings, we view first contact less as an event and more as a long process that has already begun.
The question of who is “responsible” for preparing for contact with extraterrestrial life immediately comes to mind. The communities — and their interpretive lenses — most likely to be involved in any contact scenario are military, corporate, and scientific.
By giving Americans the legal right to profit from space tourism and the extraction of planetary resources, the… Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015 could mean that companies will be the first to detect signs of alien societies. Otherwise, detecting unidentified aerial phenomena is mostly a military affair and NASA takes the lead sending messages from Earthmost activities involving extraterrestrial communication and evidence fall under a program called SETI, or the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
SETI is a collection of scientists with a variety of research activitiesincluding Breakthrough Listen, which listens to “techno signatures”, or markers, such as pollutants, of a designed technology.
SETI researchers are almost always VOTE – science, technology, engineering and mathematics – scientists. Few in the social sciences and humanities have had the opportunity to contribute to concepts of and preparations for contact.
In a promising act of disciplinary inclusion, the Berkeley SETI Research Center invited working groups in 2018 – including our Indigenous Studies Working Group – from outside the STEM fields to create perspective documents for SETI scholars to ponder.
Ethics of listening
Neither Breakthrough Listen nor SETI’s site contains an up-to-date overview ethical statement past one commitment to transparency. Our working group was not the first to raise this issue. And while the SETI Institute and certain research centers Since they have incorporated ethics into their event programming, it seems pertinent to ask who NASA and SETI are responding to, and what ethical guidelines they follow for a potential first-contact scenario.
SETI’s post-detection hub — another rare exception to SETI’s STEM centrism — seems most likely to develop a range of contact scenarios. The possible circumstances that can be imagined include finding extraterrestrial artifacts, detecting signals from thousands of light years away, dealing with linguistic incompatibility, finding microbial organisms in space or on other planets, and biological contamination of their or our kind. Whether the US government or military leaders would act on these scenarios is another matter.
SETI-affiliated scientists tend to reassure critics that the intentions of those who listen to techno signatures are benevolent, since “what harm could result from simply listening?” SETI Research Chairman Emeritus, Jill Tarter, defended listening because any alien civilization would view our listening techniques as immature or elementary.
But our working group drew on the history of colonial contacts to show the dangers of thinking that entire civilizations are relatively advanced or intelligent. For example, when Christopher Columbus and other European explorers came to America, those relationships were formed by the preconceived idea making the “Indians” less advanced their lack of writing. This led to decades of Indigenous servitude in America.
The working group’s statement also suggested that the act of listening itself already within a “phase of contactLike colonialism itself, contact is best viewed as a series of events that begins with planning, and not as a one-time occurrence. Isn’t listening in this way potentially without consent just another form of surveillance? To listen attentively but indiscriminately, our working group seemed like one kind of eavesdropping.
It seems contradictory that we begin our relations with aliens by listening to them without their consent, while actively working to dissuade other nations from doing so listening to certain US communications. If humans are initially perceived as disrespectful or careless, contact with aliens may be more likely to result their colonization of us.
Throughout the history of Western colonization, even in those few cases where contacts have had to be protected, contact has led to brutal violence, pandemics, slavery and genocide.
James Cook’s 1768 voyage on HMS Endeavor was initiated by the Royal Association. This prestigious British academic society commissioned him to calculate the solar distance between the Earth and the Sun by measuring the visible motion of Venus across the Sun from Tahiti. Society strictly forbade him any colonial assignment.
While he achieved his scientific goals, so did Cook receive orders of the Crown to map and claim as much territory as possible on the return journey. Cook’s actions initiated large-scale colonization and indigenous dispossession throughout Oceania, including the violent conquests of Australia and New Zealand.
The Royal Society gave Cook a “first guidelineto do no harm and to conduct only research that would broadly benefit humanity. However, explorers are rarely independent of their financiers, and their explorations reflect the political context of their time.
As scholars tuned into both research ethics and the history of colonialism, we wrote about Cook in our working group statement to show why SETI would want to explicitly untangle their intentions from those of corporations, the military, and the government.
Although separated by vast time and space, both Cook’s journey and SETI share important qualities, including their attraction to celestial science in the service of all humanity. They also share a discrepancy between their ethical protocols and the likely long-term effects of their success.
Could initiate the initial domino of a public alien message, or recovered bodies or ships successive events, including military action, mining of corporate resources, and perhaps even geopolitical reorganizations. The history of imperialism and colonialism on earth illustrates this not everyone benefits from the colonization. No one can know for sure how the involvement with aliens would play outthough it’s better to consider cautionary tales from Earth’s own history sooner rather than later.
This article has been updated to correct the date of James Cook’s trip.
This article was first published by The conversation.
