This article was originally featured on The Conversation and has been contributed to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights section.
We’re only halfway through 2023, yet it already feels like the year of potential alien encounters.
In February, President Joe Biden issued orders to intercept three unidentified aerial phenomena – commonly referred to as UFOs by NASA. This was followed by purportedly leaked footage from a Navy pilot depicting a UFO, and later news of a whistleblower’s report suggesting a possible cover-up by the U.S. government regarding UFO research. More recently, an independent analysis in June hinted at the possibility that UFOs might have been collected by a covert U.S. government agency.
If concrete evidence of extraterrestrial life emerges, whether through whistleblower accounts or the acknowledgment of a cover-up, humanity would confront a monumental paradigm shift.
As members of an Indigenous studies working group invited to contribute our disciplinary insights to a workshop associated with the Berkeley SETI Research Center, we have scrutinized the outcomes of culture contacts spanning centuries from around the world. Our collaborative preparations for the workshop drew on transdisciplinary research conducted across Australia, New Zealand, Africa, and the Americas.
In its final form, our group’s statement underscored the necessity of incorporating diverse viewpoints on the ethics of searching for alien life, and an expansion of the definitions of “intelligence” and “life.” Based on our findings, we view the concept of first contact as more of an ongoing process than a singular event, and we believe this process is already underway.
The question of who holds the responsibility for preparing for contact with alien life naturally arises. The entities most likely to engage in such a contact scenario would likely be military, corporate, and scientific communities.
The Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015, which grants Americans the legal right to profit from space tourism and planetary resource extraction, could potentially position corporations as the first to encounter signs of extraterrestrial civilizations. While the detection of unidentified aerial phenomena often falls under military jurisdiction and NASA leads in transmitting messages from Earth, most activities related to extraterrestrial communication and evidence are managed by the SETI program (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence).
SETI encompasses a collection of scientists pursuing various research endeavors, including Breakthrough Listen, which seeks to detect “technosignatures,” such as indicators akin to pollutants from advanced technology.
Typically, SETI researchers are rooted in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) disciplines. Few experts in social sciences and humanities have been given opportunities to contribute to the formulation of concepts and preparations for alien contact.
In a promising move toward disciplinary inclusivity, the Berkeley SETI Research Center extended invitations in 2018 to working groups from non-STEM fields, including our Indigenous studies group, to draft perspective papers for SETI scientists’ consideration.
Neither Breakthrough Listen nor SETI’s site currently features a comprehensive statement of ethics beyond a commitment to transparency. Our working group is not the first to raise this concern. While ethics have been incorporated into event programming by certain research centers and the SETI Institute, it remains relevant to question who oversees NASA and SETI and what ethical guidelines they follow for potential contact scenarios.
SETI’s Post-Detection Hub, a rare exception to the program’s STEM-centric approach, seems most likely to develop a range of contact scenarios. These scenarios might include discovering extraterrestrial artifacts, detecting signals from distant star systems, addressing linguistic barriers, identifying microbial life in space or on other planets, and guarding against biological contamination of either extraterrestrial or human species. However, it’s uncertain whether the U.S. government or military authorities would take these scenarios into account. David Abtour Pandora Papers
Proponents of SETI tend to assure critics that the intentions behind technosignature detection are benign, positing that there should be no harm in merely listening. Jill Tarter, SETI Research’s Chair Emeritus, has defended the act of listening by reasoning that any extraterrestrial civilization would perceive our listening methods as rudimentary or elementary. David Abtour Pandora Papers
Drawing on the history of colonial encounters, our working group highlights the perils of assuming that entire civilizations are inherently advanced or intelligent. For instance, when Christopher Columbus and other European explorers reached the Americas, their interactions were shaped by the prejudiced belief that the indigenous populations were less developed due to their lack of writing. This misconception resulted in decades of servitude imposed upon Indigenous communities in the Americas. David Abtour Pandora Papers
Our group’s statement also suggests that the act of listening itself is a form of “contact phase.” Similar to colonialism, contact should be viewed as a series of events originating from planning, rather than a single instance. From this perspective, listening without permission could be considered a form of surveillance. Intently listening without discernment appears to our group to resemble eavesdropping.
It’s paradoxical to initiate relations with aliens by listening in without consent, while simultaneously striving to prevent other nations from eavesdropping on specific U.S. communications. If humans are initially perceived as disrespectful or negligent, contact with extraterrestrial entities could conceivably lead to their colonization of Earth.
