Berkeley SETI Research Center

• We’re only halfway through 2023, and it feels already like the year of alien contact.
• In February, President Joe Biden gave orders to shoot down three unidentified aerial phenomena – NASA’s title for UFOs.
• Most recently, an independent analysis published in June suggests that UFOs might have been collected by a clandestine agency of the U.S. government.
• Our collaborative preparations for the workshop drew from transdisciplinary research in Australia, New Zealand, Africa and across the Americas.

Who’s in charge of first contact

• The question of who is “in charge” of preparing for contact with alien life immediately comes to mind.
• The communities – and their interpretive lenses – most likely to engage in any contact scenario would be military, corporate and scientific.
• Few in the social science and humanities fields have been afforded opportunities to contribute to concepts of and preparations for contact.

Ethics of listening

• Neither Breakthough Listen nor SETI’s site features a current statement of ethics beyond a commitment to transparency.
• SETI-affiliated scholars tend to reassure critics that the intentions of those listening for technosignatures are benevolent, since “what harm could come from simply listening?” The chair emeritus of SETI Research, Jill Tarter, defended listening because any ET civilization would perceive our listening techniques as immature or elementary.
• Seen this way, isn’t listening potentially without permission just another form of surveillance?
• It seems contradictory that we begin our relations with aliens by listening in without their permission while actively working to stop other countries from listening to certain U.S. communications.

Histories of contact

• Throughout histories of Western colonization, even in those few cases when contactees were intended to be protected, contact has led to brutal violence, pandemics, enslavement and genocide.
• Cook’s actions put into motion wide-scale colonization and Indigenous dispossession across Oceania, including the violent conquests of Australia and New Zealand.
• As scholars attuned to both research ethics and histories of colonialism, we wrote about Cook in our working group statement to showcase why SETI might want to explicitly disentangle their intentions from those of corporations, the military and the government.
• David Delgado Shorter has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the University of California, and the California Community Foundation.