by We’re only halfway through the year 2023, and it already feels like the year of alien contact.
In February, President Joe Biden ordered the release of three unidentified aerial phenomena – NASA’s title for UFOs. Then, the footage allegedly leaked from a Navy pilot of a UFO, and then news of a whistleblower’s report on a possible cover-up by the US government about UFO research. Recently, an independent analysis published in June suggests that UFOs may have been collected by a secret agency of the US government.
If any actual evidence of extraterrestrial life emerges, whether from whistleblower testimony or a cover-up confession, humans would face a historical paradigm shift.
As members of an indigenous studies working group asked to lend our disciplinary expertise to a workshop affiliated with the Berkeley SETI Research Center, we studied centuries of cultural encounters and their outcomes from around the globe. Our collaborative preparation for the workshop drew on cross-disciplinary research in Australia, New Zealand, Africa and across the Americas.
In its final form, our group statement showed the need for different perspectives on the ethics of listening for alien life and an expansion of what defines “information” and “life.” Based on our findings, we consider first contact to be less of an event and more of a long process that has already begun.
Who is in charge of the first encounter
The question of who is “in charge” of preparing for contact with alien life immediately comes to mind. The communities – and their interpretive lenses – are the most likely to engage in any contact situation, 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 corporations will be the first to spot signs of extraterrestrial society. Otherwise, while the detection of unidentified phenomena from the air is usually a military matter, and NASA is in charge of sending messages from Earth, most activities related to extraterrestrial communication and evidence fall to a program called SETI , or the search for extraterrestrial information.
SETI is a collection of scientists with a variety of research efforts, including Breakthrough Listen, which listens for “technosignatures,” or markers, such as pollutants, of designed technology.
SETI investigators are almost always STEM scholars – science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Few people in the fields of social science and humanities have been given opportunities to contribute to contact concepts and preparations.
In a prospective act of disciplinary inclusion, the Berkeley SETI Research Center invited in 2018 working groups – including our Indigenous Studies working group – from outside STEM fields to craft perspective papers that SETI scientists could consider.
The ethics of listening
There is no current statement of ethics on the Breakthough Listen site or the SETI site other than a commitment to transparency. Our working group was not the first to raise this question. And although the SETI Institute and some research centers have taken ethics into account in their event programming, it seems relevant to ask who NASA and SETI answer to, and what ethical guidelines they are following in the case of a first contact possible.
The SETI Detection Hub – another rare exception to the ETIM SETI hub – appears to be the most likely to develop a range of contact scenarios. Possible scenarios envisioned include finding ET artifacts, detecting signals from thousands of light years away, dealing with language incompatibility, finding microbial organisms in space or on another planet, and biological contamination of their species or ours. . Whether the US government or military leaders will pay attention to these cases is another matter.
SETI-affiliated scholars tend to reassure critics that the intentions of those listening for technological signatures are good, since “what harm could come from simply listening?” SETI Research chairman emeritus Jill Tarter defended listening because any ET civilization would see our listening techniques as immature or primitive.
But our working group drew on the history of colonial encounters to illustrate the dangers of thinking that entire civilizations are sufficiently advanced or intelligent. For example, when Christopher Columbus and other European explorers came to the Americas, those relationships were shaped by the preconceived notion that the “Indians” were not as advanced because of their lack of writing. This led to decades of native slavery in America.
The working group’s statement also suggested that the act of listening itself is already within a “contact phase”. Like colonialism itself, contact is best thought of as a series of events that begin with planning, rather than as a singular event. Seen this way, is listening without permission just another form of surveillance? The working group seemed to listen carefully but without discriminating against our working group.
It seems contradictory that we begin our relationship with foreigners by eavesdropping without their permission while actively working to stop other countries from eavesdropping on certain US communications. If humans are initially perceived as disrespectful or uncaring, ET contact is more likely to colonize us.
Contact history
Throughout the history of Western colonization, even in those small cases where contact people were intended to be protected, contact has resulted in brutal violence, pandemics, slavery and genocide.
The Royal Society started James Cook’s voyage in 1768 on the HMS Endeavour. This prestigious British academic society commissioned him to calculate the solar distance between the Earth and the Sun by measuring the visible movement of Venus across the Sun from Tahiti. The association strictly forbade him from any colonial commitment.
Although he achieved his scientific goals, Cook also received orders from the Crown to map and claim as much territory as possible on the return voyage. Cook’s actions implemented large-scale colonization and Indigenous dispossession across Oceania, including the violent conquests of Australia and New Zealand.
The Royal Society gave Cook a “prime directive” to do no harm and only to conduct research that would benefit humanity in general. However, explorers are rarely independent of their funders, and their explorations reflect the political contexts of their time.
As scholars grapple with research ethics and the history of colonialism, we wrote about Cook in our working group statement to demonstrate why SETI would want to overtly separate their minds from the actions of corporations, the military and government.
Although separated by time and space, both the Cook and SETI expeditions share key qualities, including their appeal to celestial science in the service of all humanity. They also share a discrepancy between their ethical protocols and the likely long-term consequences of their success.
The initial dominos of an ET public message, or recovered bodies or ships, could initiate cascading events, including military actions, corporate resource mining and perhaps even geopolitical reorganization. The history of imperialism and colonialism on Earth shows that not everyone benefits from colonization. No one knows for sure how engagement with aliens would go, though it’s better to look to cautionary tales from Earth’s own history sooner rather than later.
This article has been updated to correct the date of James Cook’s voyage.
This article is republished from The Conversation, a non-profit, independent news organization that brings you reliable facts and analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. The Conversation has a variety of free newsletters.
Written by: David Delgado Shorter, University of California, Los Angeles; Kim Tall Bear, University of Albertaand William Lempert, Bowdoin College.
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David Delgado Shorter has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the University of California, and the California Community Foundation.
William Lempert has received funding from Bowdoin College, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the US Fulbright IIE Scholars Program, the Lois Roth Endowment, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies.
Kim TallBear does not work for, consult with, share in, or be funded by any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and discloses no affiliations relevant beyond their academic appointment.
