We’re only halfway through 2023 and it already feels like the year of extraterrestrial contact.
In February, President Joe Biden ordered the downing of three unidentified aerial phenomena — NASA’s title for UFOs. Then a Navy pilot’s alleged leaked images of a UFO, and then the news of a whistleblower report on a possible U.S. government cover-up of UFO research. Most 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 it be whistleblower testimony or admission of a cover-up, people would be faced with a historic 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 have studied centuries of cultural contact and its outcomes 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 a broadening of 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.
Who is responsible for the first contact
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, business, and scientific.
By giving Americans the legal right to profit from space tourism and planetary resource extraction, the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015 could mean that companies will be the first to discover signs of alien societies. Otherwise, while detecting unidentified aerial phenomena is mostly a military affair and NASA takes the lead in sending messages from Earth, most activities surrounding extraterrestrial communications 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 efforts, including Breakthrough Listen, which listens for “technosignatures” or markers, such as pollutants, of a designed technology.
SETI researchers are almost always STEM (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, in 2018 the Berkeley SETI Research Center invited working groups—including our Indigenous Studies Working Group—from outside the STEM fields to produce perspective articles for SETI scholars to consider.
Ethics of listening
Neither Breakthrough Listen nor SETI’s site contains a current ethics statement that goes beyond a commitment to transparency. Our working group was not the first to raise this topic. And while the SETI Institute and certain research centers have incorporated ethics into their event programming, it seems pertinent to ask who NASA and SETI answer 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 one can imagine include finding alien artifacts, detecting signals from thousands of light years away, dealing with linguistic incompatibilities, 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 heed these scenarios is another matter.
SETI-affiliated scientists tend to reassure critics that the intentions of those listening to technosignatures are benevolent, since “what harm could come 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 demonstrate the dangers of thinking that entire civilizations are relatively advanced or intelligent. For example, when Christopher Columbus and other European explorers came to the Americas, those relationships were shaped by the prejudice that the “Indians” were less advanced because of their lack of writing. This led to decades of native servitude in America.
The working group’s statement also suggested that listening is already in a “contact phase.” Like colonialism itself, contact is best seen as a series of events that begins with planning, rather than as a single event. Isn’t listening in this way, potentially without consent, just another form of surveillance? Listening attentively but indiscriminately seemed like a form of eavesdropping to our working group.
It seems contradictory that we begin our relations with aliens by listening without their consent, while we are actively working to prevent other countries from listening to certain American communications. If humans are initially perceived as disrespectful or careless, alien contact could more likely lead to their colonization of us.
History of contact
Throughout the history of Western colonization, even in those few cases where contacts needed to be protected, contact has led to brutal violence, pandemics, slavery, and genocide.
James Cook’s 1768 voyage on the HMS Endeavor was initiated by the Royal Society. This prestigious British academic association commissioned him to calculate the solar distance between Earth and the Sun by measuring the visible motion of Venus across the Sun from Tahiti. Society strictly forbade him any colonial assignment.
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 journey. Cook’s actions set in motion large-scale colonization and indigenous dispossession throughout Oceania, including the violent conquests of Australia and New Zealand.
The Royal Society gave Cook a “prime directive” to do no harm and only conduct research that would broadly benefit humanity. However, researchers are rarely independent of their funders, and their explorations reflect the political context of their time.
As scholars attuned to 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 decouple their intentions from those of corporations, the military, and government.
Although separated by vast amounts of 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 disconnect between their ethical protocols and the likely long-term effects of their success.
The initial domino of a public alien message, or recovered bodies or ships, could initiate subsequent events, including military actions, corporate resource extraction, and perhaps even geopolitical reorganizations. The history of imperialism and colonialism on Earth illustrates that not everyone benefits from colonization. No one can know for sure how dealing with aliens will go, although it’s better to heed 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, an independent nonprofit organization providing facts and trusted analysis to help you understand our complex world. The Conversation has a variety of fascinating free newsletters.
It was written by: David Delgado Korter, University of California, Los Angeles; Kim TallBeer, University of Albertaand Willem 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 Fulbright IIE US Scholar 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, own shares in, or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.