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For this month’s Q&A, JustSpace cofounder Erika Nesvold spoke with space ethicist Kelly Smith, an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Clemson University, and the founder of the Society for Social and Conceptual Issues in Astrobiology (SSoCIA). Kelly discussed his career path, his plans for SSoCIA, and the frustrating reluctance of STEM researchers to reach out to philosophers for their input on ethical issues in space.

If you’re interested in learning more, or in helping to bridge the divide between the sciences and the humanities when it comes to our future in space, consider attending SSoCIA’s next conference on May 25-27, 2026 at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA, USA. Abstracts are due soon, on February 1!

The interview below has been lightly edited for length, clarity, and occasional strong language.

Q&A with Kelly Smith

What is your current or most recent position?

Before I retired [last year], I was chair of the Department of Philosophy at Clemson.

Can you tell me about your career path?

I started off as someone who decided first that I wanted to be a professor, and then I had to agonize about what I wanted to profess. I was really torn, in particular, between history, biology, and philosophy, but I finally decided to go into philosophy because I realized that in philosophy, unlike the other two, you can basically do the other things. You can do philosophy of biology, hang out with biologists, read biology, write about biology, and it still counts. Whereas if you’re a biologist and you start thinking about philosophy, it doesn’t work out very well.

So that was my thinking. I didn’t really fully factor in the job market, and philosophy is so much worse. It turned out well for me, but I was a bit lucky that that happened.

So if you started as a philosopher who was interested in biology, how did you end up working on space?

Well, I originally started out in more classical philosophy of biology, so I was writing about levels of selection and the nature of genetic causation, and other conceptual issues in biology. And then at one point, I was invited to a workshop that NASA was doing on the concept of life. Which I thought was a really interesting question! I had sort of thought about it a little bit, but I hadn’t worked on it.

And then when I went to the workshop, I realized that this is a really practical question for NASA. And they needed people to take a bit more of a big picture approach to it, rather than to have a completely operationalized definition. And so that’s what really got me hooked. I made a Star Trek joke, and I remember everyone at the table laughed, and I thought, okay, these are kind of my people.

And so, for the last 15 or 17 years or so of my career, that’s essentially what I did. I did two different kinds of things, mainly. One was conceptual issues, like the nature of life, and some questions having to do with what kinds of hypotheses and background assumptions are appropriate in astrobiology, etc. But then a lot of it was also applied ethics. There are all kinds of ethical questions here.

One of the things that I learned very early on in my career, when I started teaching other professors how to have ethical conversations in their classes, is that most people who haven’t studied ethics are just as naïve as your average undergraduate. But they don’t realize it, and it’s actually kind of dangerous. So part of what I’ve been trying to do is convince the biology and the engineer types that [while they may think philosophers] are kind of nutso, and waste a lot of time, there’s actually a good reason to have us involved in these conversations. And since that side really controls most of the prestige and the money, it’s kind of up to them to reach out to us, because we don’t have squat in terms of influence.

This is a point I made more fully in an article in The Bridge, the National Academy of Engineering journal, so if anybody really wants to see what I have to say about that, they can read that.

At the last meeting I went to with you, I talked to a bunch of philosophy students, and they were telling me that within the field of philosophy, pure philosophy is really emphasized and applied philosophy is the minority. Which is the opposite of science! Are philosophers struggling with this bridge as well?

Yeah, unfortunately, it’s a divide in philosophy now. It used to be that philosophy was dealing with really cutting-edge issues. But what’s happened historically is that whenever philosophers solve a cutting-edge issue, like motion, they lose it to another discipline. So philosophy has, for a very long time, gotten used to the idea that it doesn’t deal with things that have immediate practical consequences.

There are some of us, particularly those of us who actually bothered to get training in another discipline, who think this is just stupid. Look, there’s nothing wrong with trying to think about whether there’s a new angle on some problem that people have been arguing about for 2,000 years. That’s a perfectly legitimate enterprise, even if it doesn’t look like it. But there’s also nothing wrong with working on something that people actually care about. And this is one of the huge frustrations about being a philosopher today. The attitude that a lot of your philosophy colleagues have (they won’t put it quite this way, of course) is, if it’s simple enough for a non-philosopher to understand, then it’s just philosophy in first gear. Like, “any idiot can do that.” And they don’t understand that even philosophy in first gear is useful sometimes, if the alternative is people trying to push the vehicle with their feet.

That’s been a huge frustration for decades for me, though. I think we’re making progress. It’s becoming more and more common for younger philosophers to feel like they really need to get exposure to something else. They get, like, a master’s degree in some other thing, and then they understand that field well enough to know where a philosophical analysis might actually be useful, as opposed to just wasting everyone’s time. And that’s the flip side of this, too, that sometimes when philosophers do want to get practical, they don’t really know how, and so they’ll try to help the biologist, but they end up talking about stuff that the biologists just don’t care about. And that’s also very unfortunate.

So what kind of practical tools and products are someone like NASA coming to you in the philosophy community for?

To be honest with you, the best way to put it is that until very recently, and even then only in a limited way, NASA has not been coming to the philosophical community at all. Nor has the engineering or science community, more generally. That’s a problem.

Just to give you one example: I went [to the NASA workshop on the concept of life], and there was one other philosopher there, a very well-known guy who does philosophy of science. And I was impressed! I’m like, “Oh, they got this guy to show up. I didn’t know he had any interest at all in this kind of stuff!” So one day over lunch, I was talking to him, and he said, “I have no idea why I was invited to this. I’ve never done work on this. I mean, I think it’s kind of interesting, but I’m sort of at the end of my career. I’m not gonna change.” And I realized, this is what NASA does. It has no systematic way of getting this kind of feedback. So if they have money, and if someone in the decision chain happens to think about philosophers, they invite the first person they know. Or they’ll ask around, and they’ll get a name, and they’ll invite that person. And what that means is that you might get someone who’s interesting and has input for that meeting, but they’re not going to be publishing on it. They’re not going to come to the follow-up meeting. So it just ends there. And this happens sequentially, you know, every 5 or 10 years, NASA does this. And it gets people excited for six months or so, and then it dies. So one of the things I’ve viewed my role as in the last 15 years is trying to keep that alive, and trying to build up enough of a community on the humanities side that can better support interdisciplinary work.

Right now, another problem is that most people who are trained in the humanities have no idea what’s going on in astrobiology. They have no conception. They think this is all science fiction, still. And it’s gonna take a long time for them to change that view, particularly if science and engineering is not asking for their input. Because they don’t read the journals, they don’t talk to scientists.

Yeah, that’s something I’ve definitely encountered a lot when I’ve reached out to people on the humanities side for their perspective about space exploration or space settlement. They say, “Well, this isn’t exactly an urgent question, right? None of it will actually happen for a long time?”

The thing is (and this is not controversial), if you don’t analyze the ethical implications of some major change in advance, then what happens is that the guy with the most money, or the most ambition, or the most power does whatever the hell he wants to. And then that sets a precedent. Any after-the-fact ethical analysis is now going upstream. Now you have to say, “I know that Musk did that, and I know that we said it was legal at the time, but we shouldn’t have it, so let’s change the law.” It’s much harder to do it that way, but that’s the way humans always want to do the new sexy thing. They think they’ve got it [handled], and then only when they f it up do they call for an “ethics consult.” It’s not rocket science, but rocket scientists don’t seem to understand it sometimes.

That’s so true of environmental issues, too.

Exactly!

Like, the harm’s already been done by the time you’re going, “Oh, maybe that was a bad idea.”

Yeah, “We now can explain exactly why we should not have done that.”

I know academics, at least, understand the concept of reaching out to interdisciplinary researchers for questions beyond their field. But I have also run into people in the space industry who want to know how to understand the ethical choices in their work, but don’t feel they quite know how, because they’re also not trained philosophers. Do you recommend some structure for them to reach out, as well?

That’s part of what I’m trying to accomplish with SSoCIA [the Society for Social and Conceptual Issues in Astrobiology]. What I’m trying to get is a pool of highly interdisciplinary people who actually work on these [space ethics] issues, so that when you call them up, you at least know that you’re getting someone who’s written about this. He’s not trying to figure out what he needs to account for, and therefore making dumb mistakes. The humanities folks need to be trained a bit, and they need a community that supports their publication and will write letters for each other.

So, that’s the idea, and then if that can really get going, you can just tell people, “Look, there’s a whole group! Do you want sociology? Do you want English professors? What is it you want? Because we can provide it.” We’re not there yet, but we’re growing, so there’s hope.

So this seems like the perfect time to ask you to tell me more about SSoCIA.

Well, it’s maybe not the best name. I really wanted to go with SPASE, the Society for Philosophy of Astrobiology and Space Exploration. Fin’ perfect. Except it’s got “Philosophy” in the title, and I really did not want to have a discipline in the title, because then that discipline feels like they own it.

So it’s the Society of Social and Conceptual Issues. “Social issues” include all the ethical stuff, but also anything cultural, and “conceptual” includes things like the nature of life, questions about progress, etc. The way I sometimes put it to people is, SSoCIA is open to anyone as long as they are willing to talk in a scientifically respectable way about issues that cannot be resolved with empirical evidence.

I tell scientists, look, you are welcome to present at our conference. We really love it! But you can’t present a paper about the latest technique that you’ve developed for radio astronomy– No one’s gonna know what that is. If you want to talk about the cultural implications of big science in our modern society– Oh, okay, that’s fun! And scientists, you know, they oftentimes don’t quite get that, and they’ll try to pitch a paper as conceptual that doesn’t meet the mark. It’s a work in progress, but hopefully, eventually, we’ll get to the point where there’s at least a critical mass of competent people on both sides: There’s scientists and engineers who are sympathetic to humanities, and there are humanities folks who understand what the scientists need. A mutually supportive community: that’s the goal.

And it’s not just astrobiology, right?

No, no, it’s not just astrobiology. It started more [focused on] astrobiology, because that seemed to be where most of the issues are, but then the space exploration thing picked up, and there’s really no dividing line between those two. I think at the beginning, we wanted to emphasize astrobiology because we thought that was sexier. But it turns out it is also more science fiction-y, and when you start talking about extraterrestrials, people [get skeptical and dismissive].

And you have a meeting coming up this year with the European Astrobiology Institute?

Yes, our seventh conference is at the end of May at Carnegie Mellon. It should be a lot of fun, and anyone’s welcome to come. Even if you’re not presenting, you’re welcome to come as a visitor. So if you’re in Pittsburgh and you just want to find out what these weird people are doing, you’re welcome to stop by. Just drop me an email.

If you do want to present, February 1st is the deadline for abstract submissions, and to do that, all you have to do is fill out a little form. If you don’t want to find the website or anything like that, you can just email me, and you can give them my email address. [Email [email protected] if you want to be put in touch with Kelly Smith.]

And as you said earlier, all disciplines are welcome?

Absolutely! We are even trying very hard to recruit people like K-12 educators, journalists, science fiction writers… We have a pretty broad perspective, as long as people are reasonable. [We may be] talking about things that aren’t empirically decidable, but that doesn’t mean that you can ignore empirical data. The UFO thing is always a problem, because there’s always the UFO guys who think they’re being extremely empirical, and we have to say, “Yeah, these questions were kind of answered in the 50s. This kind of UFO talk… this is not what we’re about.”

Do you have any advice for students who are thinking about following a similar career path to space ethics and philosophy? Or just anyone who wants to get involved in this kind of work, whether they’re going through the academic process or not?

Yeah, I’ve got a few pieces of advice. One would be that wherever you’re coming from right now, you want to have an unassailable home. What I tell young people is: This is a fascinating field, and I think it’s an excellent thing to do. If nothing else, you probably want to get an article or two out in this area, because if we find life on another planet, it’s gonna immediately be the hottest area that’s ever come up.

On the other hand, you do not want to be labeled [in philosophy] as “the astro guy,” because that’s still considered a little fringe and weird. If someone says, “What’s this crap you’re doing with extraterrestrials?” You want to be able to go, “Yes, but I also work on…” you know, whatever the abstruse s is that your discipline really likes. And then people go, “Okay, he’s a legitimate guy in this field, so maybe we don’t care about his weird hobby. That’s fine.” But if you go over the top, and you really let your interests bloom, although I support that, not many will.

The other thing I would say is that this work is, by definition, highly interdisciplinary. And that’s an unusual thing that bucks the academic structures right now. I went to Duke, and at the time, Duke had a really good program in philosophy of biology. They also had the second best biology program in the country, which I could never get into on my own. So I went there, and I said, “Look, is there any way that I can study biology while I’m studying philosophy?” And what everyone said was, “Yes, that should be possible.” But no one had ever done it. And so basically, I just did it. I found some people in biology and did some research work with them to prove I wasn’t an idiot, and that I could do biology. And then eventually I became an actual graduate student in biology for a while, and did a thesis project for my Master’s. Since then, there have been several students that have gone to Duke and pursued the exact same model, because there is now an established pathway.

If you’re younger, and this is something you want to do, you have to be the kind of person who’s willing to barge through doors in a polite way. You have to be the kind of guy who’s got a little bit of an entrepreneurial thing going, and keep an eye on: “Where can I make this move?” and “Which people are going to be listening to me?” It’s very important, and that’s been my entire career. Every time I get a new job, the first question is, “How are the biology folks? Are they gonna let me come to their talks? Are they gonna let me ask ‘weird’ questions at their talks?”

“Interdisciplinary” has been a buzzword in academia for a few years, and some people have been able to take advantage of that growing interest in interdisciplinary research to pursue really interesting projects, so I’m hoping that trend continues. Because in my field (astrophysics), “interdisciplinary” tends to just mean other hard sciences, when it really needs to cross that divide between STEM and the humanities.

Exactly. Exactly. This is one of the things I talk about in my Bridge article. You may have many different engineering and science disciplines in the room, but then you don’t have a single one from the humanities side of the divide. And the fact that this didn’t even occur to you as a problem really says a lot, right? The subtext here, of course, is that many scientists and engineers think that philosophy is bullshit, because they don’t understand it.

You mentioned Star Trek earlier. Are there any particular stories that have influenced your work from the world of fiction?

I mean, any Star Trek episode. One of the nice things about Star Trek is that it models, first of all, a sort of diverse humanoid extraterrestrial ecosystem. They all look like humans, but they’re very diverse, right? That’s kind of cool. It also models an advanced human coalition that’s very peaceful. That’s an extremely positive message. I have found that almost everybody at NASA watches Star Trek, or watched it when they were a kid. It’s truly universal. That, along with Cosmos, are probably, like, the really shared cultural elements, at least for people roughly my age.

The other thing I would say that made a huge impression on me is Stanisław Lem’s book Solaris. Not the movie, the book. That was the first time I ever encountered a novel where they presented a lifeform– Well, they presented this thing on a planet, and you couldn’t really tell if it was alive or not, if it had some sort of plan, it was just very unclear. I immediately thought, there’s a good chance that whatever you come across [in real life] is gonna be like this. People are going to be arguing about whether or not it’s just a natural [non-biological] process. And eventually, it’ll become clear, but it’s gonna take a while. It’s either gonna be really weird like that, or it’s gonna be blindingly obvious, like something that bounces up to the camera and pokes it with a claw, and you’re like, “Okay, that fer’s alive.” It’s gonna be one of those two, most likely.

I’ve argued before that I don’t think regular (non-scientist) people are prepared for how ambiguous our first detection of life is going to be, and how much we’re going to spend decades arguing about it.

Right, right. Even if it’s rational like us, we’re not going to be able to communicate with it for a very long time, so people are going to be going, “What the f*** is it doing?”

Relatedly, what do you wish the public knew, or was willing to learn, about space and our activities in space?

At a very basic level, I wish the public knew more about science. One of the basic problems is that the public just doesn’t know much, period. You can fill that in with any discipline you want. So that’s a problem, but if we’re past that and we’ve got a scientifically literate public, then most people still won’t know much at all about space. They think that extraterrestrial talk is silly, but they’ve never heard of an exoplanet, etc. They’re just not well-positioned to understand these things, but that does nothing to slow the formation of opinions.

The funny thing is, it doesn’t take long to get someone interested in this. I can’t tell you how many elevator conversations I’ve had on this stuff. “I’m in Washington, what are you doing here?” “Well, I’m here talking to NASA about space exploration.” “Oh, really?” And then at the end of the elevator ride, the person wants to stay there and keep talking about why it’s okay to do whatever in space. It’s not hard to get people interested, but you have to engage them, and you have to be able to direct the conversation away from the misunderstandings and other quagmires that get in the way.

What is your personal ideal vision of humanity’s future relationship with space?

Okay, so the normative view. You know, I’m a philosopher, so I have this unfortunate tendency to argue with everybody about everything. In this particular case, many of my colleagues who are interested in space have a very particular view of environmentalism that I don’t agree with. It basically boils down to something like, “Humans should not mess up the solar system unless there are massively compelling reasons to do so.”

I, on the other hand, think that human beings have every right to expand into space. Think about it this way: it’s the kind of thing no other spacefaring race could possibly hold against us, right? On the other hand, I think we also have a solemn responsibility to do that in a way that has a minimal impact. If you absolutely have to take over a planet because for some reason humanity’s survival depends on it, and you have to destroy some species of microbe, I’d argue you have a moral obligation to do that– humans have moral worth too, after all. But if youcan achieve your ends without taking over a planet and destroying a microbe, then you shouldn’t, right? People tend to make these things more complicated than they should be because they just don’t think their positions through to their logical consequences. That is, they don’t until and unless someone irritating like me corners them and makes them question their beliefs. That’s why they killed Socrates: It’s annoying!

Take Action

You can learn more about SSoCIA at their website, or register for their upcoming joint meeting with the European Astrobiology Institute at Carnegie Mellon at the conference website. The abstract submission deadline is February 1, 2026.

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