Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-mlc7c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T14:54:26.916Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Visions of human futures in space and SETI

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 August 2017

Jason T. Wright Open the ORCID record for Jason T. Wright [Opens in a new window]  and
Michael P. Oman-Reagan
Jason T. Wright*
Affiliation:
Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics and Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds, 525 Davey Laboratory, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA Department of Astronomy, Breakthrough Listen Laboratory, University of California, 501 Campbell Hall #3411, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA PI, NASA Nexus for Exoplanet System Science
Michael P. Oman-Reagan
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, Memorial University, St. John's, NL A1C 5S7, Canada
*
e-mail: astrowright@gmail.com
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

We discuss how visions for the futures of humanity in space and SETI are intertwined, and are shaped by prior work in the fields and by science fiction. This appears in the language used in the fields, and in the sometimes implicit assumptions made in discussions of them. We give examples from articulations of the so-called Fermi Paradox, discussions of the settlement of the Solar System (in the near future) and the Galaxy (in the far future), and METI. We argue that science fiction, especially the campy variety, is a significant contributor to the ‘giggle factor’ that hinders serious discussion and funding for SETI and Solar System settlement projects. We argue that humanity's long-term future in space will be shaped by our short-term visions for who goes there and how. Because of the way they entered the fields, we recommend avoiding the term ‘colony’ and its cognates when discussing the settlement of space, as well as other terms with similar pedigrees. We offer examples of science fiction and other writing that broaden and challenge our visions of human futures in space and SETI. In an appendix, we use an analogy with the well-funded and relatively uncontroversial searches for the dark matter particle to argue that SETI's lack of funding in the national science portfolio is primarily a problem of perception, not inherent merit.

Keywords

colonialismfutureshuman spaceflightscience fictionSETI
Type
Research Article
Information
International Journal of Astrobiology , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , April 2018 , pp. 177 - 188
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abrams, J.J. (2009). Star Trek. Paramount Pictures, Los Angeles, CA.Google Scholar
Achenbach, J. (2003). Captured by Aliens: The Search for Life and Truth in a Very Large Universe. Kensington Publishing Corporation, New York, NY.Google Scholar
Anker, P. (2005). The ecological colonization of space. Environ. Hist. 10, 239–268.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Annis, J. (1999). An astrophysical explanation for the ‘great silence’. J. Br. Interplanet. Soc. 52, 19–22.Google Scholar
Arnold, L.F.A. (2005). Transit light-curve signatures of artificial objects. Astrophys. J. 627, 534–539.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Asimov, I. (1981). Asimov on Science Fiction. Doubleday, New York, NY.Google Scholar
Baker, G. (1988). Alien Nation. 20th Century Fox, Los Angeles, CA.Google Scholar
Barr, M.S. (1992). Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction. University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, IA.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Battaglia, D. (ed.) (2006). E.T. Culture: Anthropology in Outerspaces. Duke University Press, Durham, NC.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baum, S.D., Haqq-Misra, J.D. & Domagal-Goldman, S.D. (2011). Would contact with extraterrestrials benefit or harm humanity? A scenario analysis. Acta Astronaut. 68, 2114–2129.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berman, R. (1995). Star Trek: Voyager. CBS Television Distribution, Santa Monica, CA.Google Scholar
Billings, L. (2007). Overview: ideology, advocacy, and spaceflight – evolution of a cultural narrative. In Societal Impact of Spaceflight, ed. Dick, S.J., NASA SP, ch. 25, pp. 483–499. National Aeronautics and Space Administration.Google Scholar
Blomkamp, N. (2009). District 9. TriStar Pictures, Culver City, CA.Google Scholar
Burton, L. (1993). ‘Second Chances’. Star Trek: The Next Generation, Season 6, Episode 24, CBS Television Distribution.Google Scholar
Burton, T. (1996). Mars Attacks! Warner Bros. Pictures, Burbank, CA.Google Scholar
Cabrol, N.A. (2016). Alien mindscapes – a perspective on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Astrobiology 16(9), 661–676.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Capova, K.A. (2013). The Charming Science of the Other: The Cultural Analysis of the Scientific Search for Life beyond Earth. Durham University, Durham, UK. PhD Thesis.Google Scholar
Chyba, C.F. & Hand, K.P. (2005). Astrobiology: the study of the living universe. Annu. Rev. Astron. Astrophys. 43, 31–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ćirković, M.M. & Vukotić, B. (2008). Astrobiological phase transition: towards resolution of Fermi's Paradox. Orig. Life Evol. Biosph. 38, 535–547.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Clarke, A. (1951). The Exploration of Space. Temple Press, Philadelphia, PA.Google Scholar
Clarke, A. (1953). Childhood's End. Ballantine Books, New York, NY.Google Scholar
Clarke, A. (1962). Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible. Bantam Science and Mathematics. Harper & Row, New York, NY.Google Scholar
Clarke, A.C. (1981). The space elevator: ‘thought experiment,’ or key to the universe? Adv. Earth Orient. Appl. Space Technol. 1(1), 39–48.Google Scholar
Cocconi, G. & Morrison, P. (1959). Searching for interstellar communications. Nature 184(4690), 844–846.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Collins, S.G. (2008). All Tomorrow's Cultures: Anthropological Engagements with the Future. Berghahn Books, New York, NY.Google Scholar
Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, p. 139.Google Scholar
Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Rev. 43(6), 1241–1299.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dean, J. (1998). Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY.Google Scholar
Denning, K. (2011). Ten thousand revolutions: conjectures about civilizations. Acta Astronaut. 68(3), 381–388.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Denning, K. (2013). Impossible predictions of the unprecedented: Analogy, history, and the work of prognostication. In Astrobiology, History, and Society, Advances in Astrobiology and Biogeophysics, ed. Vakoch, D.A., pp. 301–312. Springer, Berlin Heidelberg.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dick, S.J. (2006). Anthropology and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence: an historical view. Anthropol. Today 22(2), 3–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dillon, G.L. (2012). Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction. University of Arizona Press, Tucson.Google Scholar
Drake, F. (1980). N is neither very small nor very large. In Strategies for the Search for Life in the Universe: A Joint Session of Commissions 16, 40, and 44, Held in Montreal, Canada, During the IAU General Assembly, 15 and 16 August, 1979, ed. Papagiannis, M.D. D. Reidel Pub. Co., Dordrecht, Holland; Boston: sold and distributed in the U.S.A. and Canada by Kluwer Boston, c1980. p. 27.Google Scholar
Drake, F.D. (1961). Project OZMA. Phys. Today 14, 40–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dyson, F.J. (1960). Search for artificial stellar sources of infrared radiation. Science 131, 1667–1668.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Emmerich, R. (1996). Independence Day. 20th Century Fox.Google Scholar
Finney, B. & Bentley, J. (2014). A tale of two analogues: learning at a distance from the ancient Greeks and Maya and the problem of Deciphering Extraterrestrial Radio Transmissions. In Archaeology, Anthropology, and Interstellar Communication, ed. Vakoch, D.A., pp. 65–78. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Office of Communications, History Program Office, Washington, DC.Google Scholar
Garber, S.J. (1999). Searching for good science – the cancellation of NASA's SETI program. J. Br. Interplanet. Soc. 52, 3–12.Google Scholar
Genovese, T.R. (2017). The New Right Stuff: Social Imaginaries of Outer Space and the Capitalist Accumulation of the Cosmos. Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ. MA thesis.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gertz, J. (2016). Reviewing METI: a critical analysis of the arguments. arXiv:1605.05663.Google Scholar
Gertz, J. (2017). Post-detection SETI protocols & METI: the time has come to regulate them both. arXiv:1701.08422.Google Scholar
Gilman, C.I. (2015). Dark Orbit. Tor, New York.Google Scholar
Gorman, A. (2009). Cultural landscape of space. In Handbook of Space Engineering, Archaeology, and Heritage, eds Darrin, A.G. & O'Leary, B.L., pp. 335–346. CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gott, J.R. III (1993). Implications of the Copernican principle for our future prospects. Nature 363, 315–319.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Graeber, D. (2015). The utopia of rules: on technology, stupidity, and the secret joys of bureaucracy. Melville House. OCLC: 908261537.Google Scholar
Gray, R.H. (2015). The Fermi paradox is neither Fermi's nor a paradox. Astrobiology 15, 195–199.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Grewell, G. (2001). Colonizing the Universe: Science Fictions then, now, and in the (imagined) Future. Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, pp. 25–47.Google Scholar
Haqq-Misra, J. (2016). The transformative value of liberating mars. New Space 4, 64–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haraway, D.J. (2013). SF: science fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, so far. Ada: J. Gend. New Media Technol., No. 3. doi: 10.7264/N3KH0K81, http://adanewmedia.org/2013/11/issue3-haraway/.Google Scholar
Harrison, A., Billingham, J., Dick, S.J., Finney, B., Michaud, M.A., Tarter, D.E. & Vakoch, D.A. (2000). The role of the social sciences in SETI. In When SETI Succeeds: The Impact of High-Information Contact, ed. Tough, A., vol. 1, pp. 71–85. Foundation for the Future, Bellevue, Wash.Google Scholar
Harrison, A.A. (2005). Overcoming the image of little green men: astrosociology and SETI. California Sociological Association Conf.Google Scholar
Hart, M.H. (1975). Explanation for the absence of extraterrestrials on Earth. Q. J. R. Astron. Soc. 16, 128.Google Scholar
Heinlein, R. (1965). Farnham's Freehold. Signet Books. New American Library, New York, NY.Google Scholar
Herzing, D.L. (2014). Profiling nonhuman intelligence: an exercise in developing unbiased tools for describing other ‘types’ of intelligence on earth. Acta Astronaut. 94(2), 676–680.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Imarisha, W. & Brown, A.M. (eds) (2015). Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements. A K Press, Oakland.Google Scholar
Irvine, J.T. & Gal, S. (2000). Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. In Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities, ed. Kroskrity, P. School of American Research Press, Santa Fe. p. 35–83.Google Scholar
Lambourne, R., Shallis, M. & Shortland, M. (1990). Close Encounters?: Science and Science Fiction. Taylor & Francis, Abington, UK.Google Scholar
Le Guin, U.K. (1974). The Dispossessed. HarperCollins, New York.Google Scholar
Le Guin, U.K. (2004). The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination. Shambhala; Distributed in the United States by Random House. OCLC: 52418183.Google Scholar
Lem, S. (1970). Solaris. Harcourt, San Diego.Google Scholar
Lempert, W. (2014). Decolonizing encounters of the third kind: alternative futuring in native science fiction film. Vis. Anthropol. Rev. 30(2), 164–176.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lingam, M. & Loeb, A. (2017). Fast radio bursts from extragalactic light sails. Astrophys. J. 837, L23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lockhart, E.A. (2015). Nerd/Geek Masculinity: Technocracy, Rationality, and Gender in Nerd Culture's Countermasculine Hegemony. Texas A&M University, College Station, TX. PhD Thesis.Google Scholar
Lowe, E.V. (1996). Homeboys in Outer Space. CBS, Santa Monica, CA.Google Scholar
Marrodán Undagoitia, T. & Rauch, L. (2016). Dark matter direct-detection experiments. J. Phys. G: Nucl. Phys. 43(1), 013001.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCray, P. (2012). The Visioneers: How a Group of Elite Scientists Pursued Space Colonies, Nanotechnologies, and a Limitless Future. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.Google Scholar
Messeri, L. (2017). Resonant worlds: cultivating proximal encounters in planetary science. Am. Ethnol. 44(1), 131–142.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Milburn, C. (2010). Modifiable futures: science fiction at the bench. j-ISIS 101(3), 560–569.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Morgan, A. (2014). The rise of the Geek: exploring masculine identity in The Big Bang Theory.Google Scholar
Nama, A. (2008). Black Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film. University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (2015). NASA Astrobiology Strategy 2015. NASA.Google Scholar
Olson, V.A. (2010). American Extreme: An Ethnography of Astronautical Visions and Ecologies. Rice University, Houston, TX. PhD Thesis.Google Scholar
Oman-Reagan, M.P. (2015a). The social lives of plants, in space. Astrosociol. Insights 4(2), 4–8.Google Scholar
Oman-Reagan, M.P. (2015b). Unfolding the space between stars: anthropology of the interstellar. In 114th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association. American Anthropological Association.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
O'Neill, G.K. (1974). The colonization of space. Phys. Today 27(9), 32–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Redfield, P. (2002). The half-life of empire in outer space. Soc. Stud. Sci. 32(5), 791–825.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robinson, K. (1993). Red Mars. Bantam Spectra science fiction. Bantam Books, New York, NY.Google Scholar
Roddenberry, G. (1966). Star Trek. CBS Television Distribution.Google Scholar
Saberhagen, F. (1967). Berserker. Ballantine, New York, NY, USA.Google Scholar
Sagan, C. (1985a). Contact: A Novel. Simon and Schuster, New York, NY.Google Scholar
Sagan, C. (1985b). Cosmos. Cognitive systems monographs. Ballantine Books.Google Scholar
Sagan, C. & Druyan, A. (1994). Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. Random House Publishing Group, New York, NY.Google Scholar
Shostak, S. (2011). L: How long do they last? In Searching for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, The Frontiers Collection. ed. Shuch, H.P. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. p. 451. ISBN 978-3-642-13195-0.Google Scholar
Sontag, S. (1966). Against Interpretation: And Other Essays. Delta Book, Picador, New York, NY.Google Scholar
Spielberg, S. (1977). Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Columbia Pictures, Culver City, CA.Google Scholar
Swain, C. & Nieli, R. (2003). Contemporary Voices of White Nationalism in America. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tarter, J. (2001). The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). Annu. Rev. Astron. Astrophys. 39, 511–548.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thomas, S.R. (2000). Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African diaspora. Warner Books, New York, NY.Google Scholar
Tipler, F.J. (1980). Extraterrestrial intelligent beings do not exist. Q. J. R. Astron. Soc. 21, 267–281.Google Scholar
Tsing, A.L. (2014). Strathern beyond the human: testimony of a spore. Theory Cult. Soc. 31(2), 221–241.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vakoch, D.A. (1998). The dialogic model: representing human diversity in messages to extraterrestrials. Acta Astronaut. 42, 705–710.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Valentine, D. (2012). Exit strategy: profit, cosmology, and the future of humans in space. Anthropol. Q. 85(4), 1045–1067.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Watts, P. (2006). Blindsight. Tor, New York.Google Scholar
Wells, H. (1898). The War of the Worlds. Dover Publications, Mineola, NY.Google Scholar
Wright, J.T. (2017). Prior indigenous technological species. arXiv:1704.0763; Int. J. Astrobiol. in production.Google Scholar
Wright, J.T., Mullan, B., Sigurdsson, S. & Povich, M.S. (2014). The Ĝ infrared search for extraterrestrial civilizations with large energy supplies. I. Background and justification. Astrophys. J. 792, 26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yurtsever, U. & Wilkinson, S. (2015). Limits and signatures of relativistic spaceflight. arXiv:1503.05845.Google Scholar
Zuckerman, B. & Hart, M. (1995). Extraterrestrials: Where Are They? Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar