Scientific American finds the search for extraterrestrial intelligence racist and colonialist

I claim that there is no object that can't be woken up. Anything can be turned into a topic for Woke beefing.

This time it is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, popularized and brought to life by Carl Sagan, whose eponymous institute at Cornell and the SETI Institute scoured the skies looking for evidence of life on other worlds.

There are lots of planets that could support life, but we haven't found any. According to a new article in Scientific American, we are partly to blame for our failure. We are doing it wrong because of who we are.

Rebecca Charbonneau is a historian in residence at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and a Jansky Fellow.

Charbonneau wrote a thesis.

. . . .increasingly, SETI scientists are grappling with the disquieting notion that, much like their intellectual forebears, their search may somehow be undermined by biases they only dimly perceive—biases that could, for instance, be related to the misunderstanding and mistreatment of Indigenous peoples and other marginalized groups that occurred during the development of modern astronomy and many other scientific fields.

Scientific American is rapidly becoming a useless publication. I used to read it a lot when I was a kid, but back then it was very boring. It is a disguise to propagandize its readers.

When you read Charbonneau's thesis, you can hear your kishkes tighten up, but there's more. If you click below, you will be taken to a page where you can read for free.

Charbonneau sees space exploration as a continuation of our imperialist and colonial histories. SETI carries a lot of intellectual, and that is one of the reasons why we use it to detect life in the Universe.

Her thesis is that SETI doesn't use racist and colonialist methods to assess intelligence.

Charbonneau answered Garzn's questions in Roman style.

If decolonization isn’t just a metaphor but rather a process, that implies it’s about reckoning with history and striving to fix past mistakes. That’s something easy to say but much harder to actually define, let alone to do. In the context of SETI, what might decolonization’s “reckoning” look like?

It’s a great question. Ultimately, in Tuck and Yang’s interpretation of decolonization, this would look like prioritizing the sovereignty of Indigenous cultures and respecting their wishes regarding settled scientific infrastructure. And while that is critically important, we shouldn’t entirely discount the symbolic, dare I say metaphorical, nature of colonialism at play in SETI. Fundamentally, SETI concerns listening to alien civilizations, ideally, but we also have to get better at listening to Earthlings! We’re not very good at that right now, but we’re starting to move in that direction. There are members of the SETI community, myself included, who are very interested in listening to marginalized and historically excluded perspectives.

A lot of SETI scientists start their research from the technical search perspective, without deeply considering the implications and impact of their listening. They are simply interested in finding evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations, which is valuable. I think that to do that, however, without thinking critically about how we conceptualize big abstract ideas, such as “intelligence” and “civilization,” and without considering the ethics of the search and its cultural implications, would be a huge mistake. These ideas are tightly bound with the histories of racism, genocide and imperialism, and to use them haphazardly can be harmful. How we use these symbols of the past when thinking about alien civilizations also says a lot about how we view Earth’s civilizations, and this is where Indigenous Studies scholars, such as those who contributed to the special SETI issue of the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, can make great contributions. They have a unique perspective on the impact of contact, and how concepts like “intelligence” can be weaponized.

Just another attempt at self-flagellation for our treatment of remote cultures is what the last paragraph of Charbonneau's answer is about. She drags in genocide, imperialism, racism, and indigenous studies because they have nothing to do with the way SETI scholars find life on other planets. SETI scientists have pondered ways to communicate with extraterrestrial life and how they might communicate with us.

Charbonneau doesn't explain how to listen to marginalized and historically excluded perspectives. Is it not possible to say that we are all human and share some characteristics? The subject of Sagan's "golden record" was sent on the spacecaft.

On board each Voyager spacecraft is a time capsule: a 12-inch, gold-plated copper disk carrying spoken greetings in 55 languages from Earth’s peoples, along with 115 images and myriad sounds representing our home planet. Selected for NASA by Carl Sagan and others, and produced by science writer Timothy Ferris, the disks are essentially a “greatest hits” package portraying the biodiversity of Earth and the diversity of human cultures. From the Golden Gate to the Great Wall, Beethoven to Chuck Berry, from mountain breezes to crashing surf, a dog’s howl and a baby’s cry, the disks may someday serve as “letters of introduction” to a passing extraterrestrial civilization that may stop and inspect the robots and become inquisitive about their place of origin.

This person is a colonialist. Greetings in 55 languages, showing the diversity of speech, and 115 images, which are a mixture of scientific stuff and pictures of people from all over the planet

The record is here.

Wait! There is more to come.

It does feel ironic. SETI is built around listening for something out there but perhaps at the cost of ignoring much of what is right here on this planet. For instance, you’ve repeatedly mentioned the cultural implications of terms such as “intelligence” and “civilization,” but how about the word “alien,” too? All of these terms have very different connotations—even destructive ones—as historically applied to Indigenous peoples or, for that matter, as applied to all the other sentient beings that live on Earth. Even now some people don’t consider nonhuman animals to be sentient, let alone possessing any real intelligence. And throughout history, building empires has come at the cost of discounting and dehumanizing Indigenous peoples as lesser beings, incapable of sophisticated thought and societal organization. Yet “intelligence” is right there in SETI’s name. Should we reconsider that framing?

SETI is designed to listen outward, but as you said, it’s not always so great at listening inward. And I should preface this by saying that there are members of the SETI community who are very interested in doing this work. And oftentimes these missteps are not made consciously—we’re all operating within our own cultural frameworks. And so, of course, when we are thinking about the “other,” the imagined alien, we’re going to project our own understanding of what that looks like onto this blank slate. In fact, some people even call SETI a mirror. Jill Tarter, an eminent SETI scientist, famously referred to SETI as holding up a cosmic mirror, where we’re looking for the “other,” but in the process of doing that, we are really learning about ourselves.

As for “intelligence,” that’s certainly a dangerous word, and it has been used in very harmful ways. Eugenics, for example, used the limited concept of “intelligence” to justify genocide. I’m therefore sometimes troubled by the word intelligence in SETI. For one thing, we might not even be able to identify what intelligence is. And because of this, maybe we [will] someday make contact and [won’t] even recognize that we’ve done so. But it’s also important to think very critically about why we search for intelligence. Is there something special about intelligence? Does intelligence deserve more respect than whatever we might perceive to be nonintelligence? We might perceive microbes as nonintelligent life, for example. Does that life have a right to exist without us bothering it? Or is it just germs—just bugs that we are going to just bring back and study and pick apart?

Intelligence has something special about it. Is there a form that surpasses ours? How can it be done? For the same reason, we are interested in animal intelligence as well.

The money quote from Charbonneaus is in italics.

We may not be able to recognize intelligence when we see it, and we may not respect or honor things we don’t perceive to be intelligent. That is what we did in many colonial interactions. Certain countries in Europe made “first contact” with Indigenous peoples, perceived them to be nonintelligent and therefore not worthy of life, not worthy of respect or dignity. And that is troubling to me. What’s going to be different next time?

Charbonneau doesn't know how SETI works. They are looking for signs of technological development, like radio signals, but is that colonialist? SETI uses astronomy and telescopes as well. It is possible to detect signs of life produced by organisms that do not have intelligence. SETI scientists have been thinking about how extraterrestrials might communicate for decades.

I would like to know if there is another way to detect aliens. She doesn't seem to care or tell us anything. She wants us to know how good she is and how bad she was.

Let me push back on one aspect here, though. Might there be a degree of incompatibility between openness to other ways of being and SETI’s core tenets? After all, SETI—all of astronomy, really—is built on the assumption of universality, that the laws of physics are the same throughout the observable universe regardless of one’s social constructs. A radio telescope, for instance, will work the same way whether it’s here on Earth or somewhere on the other side of the cosmos. Regardless of context, certain shared fundamentals exist to allow common, predictable, understandable outcomes. SETI takes this conceit even further by elevating mathematics as a universal language that can be understood and translated anywhere and by anyone. What are your thoughts on this?

So let me preface this by saying I am not a mathematician. But I do write about math. And there are many anthropologists who study mathematical systems in different cultures. They see that, even on Earth, among human cultures, there are different ways of thinking about math. And while mathematics is the language we use on Earth in our hegemonic culture to describe what we are seeing, we don’t know that another species will use that same language to describe what they are seeing. So while I don’t want to discount universality, I do think any assumptions about this are perhaps optimistic, to put it kindly. The core of what I’m trying to say is that we must critically interrogate our assumptions about life and universality, because we will all too often find that they say more about us than aliens.

Dr. Charbonneau, since other creatures won't understand the kind of math used by Earthlings, what about just regular waves of radio waves? Charbonneau ignores those mathematicians that think that math is an objective truth and fails to tell us how our fixation with Earth math will affect us from finding other cultures. Analyzing our assumptions won't help us.

I don't know what's happened to Scientific American, but it's full of stuff like this, I've written about it many times. I'm aware that the magazine has gone woke under the direction of Laura Helmuth.

John.