Hello JustSpace newsletter subscribers,

You might notice that this edition of our newsletter looks a bit different. We’ve switched our newsletter hosting service from Substack to Buttondown. You don’t need to do anything on your end, but if you want to find the archives of our previous newsletter posts, they can now be found at https://buttondown.com/TheJustSpaceAlliance/archive/.

In the midst of all this newsletter migration, we’ve also been following exciting news about the SETI Institute’s new initiative, the Discovery and Futures Lab, which fosters novel and anticipatory research at the intersection of science, society, our planet, and the search for life beyond Earth. 

See below for our Q&A with the co-directors of the SETI Discovery and Futures Lab: philosopher, ethicist, and interdisciplinary lead Chelsea Haramia, and astronomer, artist, and science lead Lucian Walkowicz.

What is the background for the kind of research the Discovery and Futures Lab wants to foster? 

Lucian: Our Lab is housed in the Carl Sagan Center of the SETI Institute. A little bit of context for this is that these kinds of considerations– what you might call the “broader impacts” or interdisciplinary cross-sections with SETI specifically– were very much a part of the SETI Institute's founding early on. One of our research fellows, Rebecca Charbonneau, who is a historian, is actually surfacing some of this history now with her work with both John Billingham's papers and Jill Tarter's papers. Early on, the founders of the SETI Institute talked about how important it was to have this interdisciplinary research.

But then over the years, SETI has historically just been very difficult research to fund on its own, let alone the problems of funding things from a multidisciplinary lens. SETI has struggled for legitimacy over the course of its history, and that has made it very difficult for the technical search itself to be funded.

So naturally out of that, the focus became the technical side of doing SETI searches. And now, of course, the SETI Institute also does a substantial amount of astrobiology, including all possible forms of the search for life. Funding that work became much more of the focus.

The Institute had recently received a funding gift, and was looking to the Science Advisory Board to get ideas about what sort of special contributions this bequest could make. So coming out of that was this idea to resurface some of that [interdisciplinary] work and to take what had again previously been called “post-detection” and make a real interdisciplinary research initiative out of it. The advocacy for it being a worthwhile use of funds– that all happened over the last couple of years.

Then finally, in the spring of last year, we got the go-ahead and wrote a very, very extensive proposal, like a 100-page book, essentially, to the SETI Institute on the whats and the whys and the hows, and here we are today.

That's really interesting, and yet another example of why we need science historians: to demonstrate that we didn’t just recently invent the concept of interdisciplinary research, but that the need for interdisciplinary work has been pointed out in the past.

Chelsea: Yeah, I think it's really important to highlight that this was something that SETI Institute had been involved in way, way back in the day, and that there also have been other similar efforts to do this kind of work. The SETI Post-Detection Hub that's based in St. Andrews, they're also trying to do this, but largely without funding. The Open University in the UK has an astrobiology department that really fosters a lot of interdisciplinary astrobiology work, including a position in astrobiology ethics currently held by Emma Puranen. So there are people who are doing it kind of piecemeal, or fixed term, or without a lot of funding. We also saw at AbSciCon [recently] that there are a couple of places that are starting programs to think interdisciplinarily about astrobiology and SETI.

But we seized the opportunity to really take an ambitious approach to this very vital work.

Lucian: We have to remember: Why is it important to have this work be funded? Because it takes time, right? If you want to make real, beefy progress, it's difficult for people to do that if the initiatives are unfunded, and if essentially everybody is doing this work out of their volunteer time. It's difficult to make that a priority.

There's all kinds of factors in how that makes it preferentially possible for people in secure senior positions to be able to do that work. Whereas spending your time on something that is a volunteer effort, that is also not widely recognized as worthwhile by everyone, means that early and even mid-career people take on higher risks by pursuing those forms of research, even if they are worthwhile things to do.

So we're really grateful to have even the beginnings of some funding to do it, because it means we can actually fund at least partial time for our research fellows to really set aside dedicated time and do these projects.

Chelsea: The power differentials and the capability differentials are what makes it easy to exploit people, even unintentionally, who are early-career, because so often the thing that really helps you in your career is something that you take the initiative to do that isn't necessarily paid. And we don't want to exploit that motivation that early career researchers have, to seize on something and spend time on it when it's uncompensated and riskier. 

But we also want to draw attention to how important this research is. It's not silly and it's not frivolous. It's very vital. So what we can do is not just compensate researchers, especially early career researchers, but also make sure that this kind of research gets traction as respectable in the larger academic community.

What are the gaps and the questions that you’re interested in addressing with the Discovery and Futures Lab?

Lucian: We've been using this tagline, which is not so much a tagline as something that people ask from both a research perspective and also just from a popular interest, curiosity perspective, which is: What happens if life beyond Earth is discovered?

Certainly in my career of doing lots of teaching and informal [astronomy] outreach, people ask that all the time, and they envision that maybe there's a system. And honestly, there kind of isn't. There's a lot of unknowns.

Earlier, Chelsea referenced the phrase “post-detection”. For many people, both the folks who are actually doing the search for life, and then also just in popular depictions, we have this idea that “discovery” is this singular moment in time. But honestly, if you just think about it, discoveries of anything aren't single moments. They're processes. They're usually long periods of time where there's incomplete information, or confusing information, or seemingly contradictory information. People are debating, arguing over whether certain forms of data can be verified, doing follow-up tests, et cetera. All of that is an extended process.

These questions of: What will happen [if we discover life]? How will people perceive it? What is the best way to talk about it? What should scientists do? What are the ways that we could be responsible in our science? All of those are research questions. Our mission is that we do novel and, crucially, anticipatory research at these intersections. Not just the science of the search for life, but also how that science is done, who can do that science, what it means for society, for the planet, for the other forms of life we share this planet with, and how all of those things intersect with the search for life beyond Earth.

Chelsea: I would add that like that not only is discovery a process, it's also a process that has already started. We're already engaged in it. The science that has already gone into searching, that's part of the discovery process: the putative discoveries, the ambiguous data, the possibilities, the false alarms– all of that is part of the discovery process. And preparing ourselves for a confirmed, verified, discovery (which is its own kind of sub-process)? We're involved in it already and can anticipate being involved into the future.

We really want to preach a kind of agnosticism with respect to how likely it is that there really will be some sort of moment where people can suddenly say, “Now I know aliens exist.” That's probably not super likely and not really what should be the focus of preparations.

Lucian: When I talk to other astronomers, particularly [those] who work in SETI or astrobiology, about what we think is going to happen, frequently people are like, “This is going to be so transformative! This is going to be amazing!” You hear all kinds of things, right? Researchers will often say that they think this will bring greater unity on Earth. There's all kinds of really, really big, often positive aspirations. Which is natural, because obviously we're out here doing this work. We're really hoping that it will have positive effects on the world around us, and that it will be appreciated and enjoyed as something that is good, particularly for human beings.

But then you take a step back, and you remember that the people that astronomers envision delivering this information to already have their own beliefs. They have a whole information ecosystem that they exist within. They have that media landscape, not only from a news perspective, but also all the popular depictions that have happened in science fiction.

Aside from the academic value of learning more through research about how scientific discovery and society interact, it sounds like anticipatory research gives you potential guidance and policies. Do you foresee that you'll be able to give advice to the rest of the research community and the science communication community based on the results of your research?

Chelsea: Yes, advice to, but also advice from. We want it to work both ways. We want people who are natural scientists engaged in searches to be in a position to understand the ethical, philosophical, social, interspecies, and environmental aspects of what they're doing. And we also want to hear from them about what's involved in their embodied experiences of searching and potentially making discoveries, because they're not only responsible for a lot of how things get communicated and how the science actually gets done, but we also have responsibilities to the scientists themselves. 

So we want it to be a very reciprocal situation, where we're thinking about responsible science and we're also thinking about responsibilities to scientists. On the former side, we can give recommendations about responsible science based on all kinds of interdisciplinary research. And then we can also come up with materials, policies, potentially white papers, publications that help to guide others, non-scientists, in understanding what our obligations to the scientists are.

Speaking of interdisciplinarity, it sounds like this kind of work is also going to be useful and interactive both ways with how scientific discovery works in other (non-SETI) fields. You could learn a lot about how scientific discoveries get announced and disseminated that would be useful to like medical science and things like that.

Chelsea: Absolutely. Or like synthetic biology, right? 

Lucian: I definitely think that there is some potential for more cross-cutting, widely applicable lessons that could be learned. This is one of the ways in which talking about space stuff is often a nice sandbox for understanding things like how scientific and technical information is communicated and understood in the realm of something that is not already heavily politicized and heavily understood to be impactful. If you think about genetically modified organisms and getting people to talk about those things– The seemingly fancifulness of talking about life beyond Earth [makes] it a space where people can look at issues around, for example, mis- and disinformation in a setting that takes them away from the entrenched, highly contested issues that are already on people's minds.

Chelsea: And it raises questions of expertise, specifically scientific expertise. There's a lot of tension around expertise these days in the information landscape, so that's something that we can contribute to more broadly than just in discovery scenarios. 

There are aspects of discovery, of searching, of all of it that also have these nice, broader applications. One of the things that got me into studying astrobiology ethics research was this activity of people sending messages to whoever's out there, and the ethical implications of that and the responsibilities involved in speaking for Earth. You know, “Who speaks for Earth?” which is a question that SETI practitioners have been asking [for some time]. Jill Tarter is a pretty prominent person asking this question. And then you start to think about how to answer those questions of: How do you represent humanity and our planet? How do you speak for everyone? How do you think about this, not just for everyone existing now, but with respect to future generations? Because so much of what happens not only in science, but elsewhere and interconnected with science, are things that stand to impact humans and all that exists on our planet well into the future. And that kind of research absolutely carries implications for questions, activities, prospects, scientific and otherwise, that go well beyond the search for life.

Lucian: Something I often hear people say in response to this kind of thing is: “Well, you're not going to get everyone to agree, so what even is the point?” And I like to gently push back and say: First of all, no, you're not going to get everyone to agree. There's not going to be perfect global consensus on anything, ever, probably. But that doesn't mean that there isn't productivity and worth in trying to include considerations that are at least more representative of humanity than those things often are.

The point is not necessarily to get everyone to agree. The point is that these are discoveries that have potentially global ramifications, and that means that people in a global sense should have the ability to at least be participants in their own futures. And that's true of a lot of different kinds of scientific discoveries. It's just we happen to deal with the one that is life beyond Earth.

Chelsea: When people say, which they often do, “We're not going to get agreement. We're not going to get consensus,” they're assuming that that's the goal already, and they're just despairing about it. But we don't want to assume, we want to question all of our assumptions. Okay, global agreement, that's one possibility, but it's not the only possibility. And so one of the things we want to do is foster discussions that talk about what our goals should even be, and not presume that it should be something like uniform agreement. And if consensus matters, in what sense does it matter? If consent matters, in what sense does it matter? 

Thinking about this question of speaking for Earth and representation has brought in a lot of the research I've done in feminist philosophy and the question of speaking for others, which comes up when people are trying to fight oppression across borders. There's all kinds of pitfalls. There's all kinds of ways to screw it up, even when you have the best intentions. There's all kinds of ways to be misguided about what the goals and the responsibilities are. But there's also a really important obligation to not just say, “I could make mistakes” or “I'm ignorant in important ways,” and “So therefore, I don't have to do any of this work,” right? This question of: “How do we represent other people properly and responsibly and respectfully and in ways that promote better or more just outcomes?”, this is something that comes up all over the place. And it's very, very relevant to what is especially global about what we're doing, which is not assuming a lot of things that tend to be assumed, even with good intentions, by people who are in the West. Things like, “How do we get everyone's consent? That's impossible. So let's just message anyway,” or something like that. Well, consent, it turns out, is a pretty Western notion. And there are a lot of places where consent isn’t even all that important, in part because there are structures and mechanisms in place such that questions of consent are much less relevant because everybody's already doing things in a certain way that don't require these interactions or power differentials where consent matters.

Do you have any advice for students or early-career researchers who want to get involved in this kind of work?

Lucian: Obviously I'm biased, because I am a person from an astronomy background that became interested in interdisciplinary studies. I think just “read voraciously” is a good starting place. [There’s a] mistake that people who come from the physical sciences or the natural sciences more broadly make all the time, which is that they assume that because something sounds like an opinion question to them that it isn't research. Questions like: “What are the best ways to communicate my science?” You can look at people who are successful science communicators and [scientists will] assume that the thing that makes them a good science communicator is all in their delivery, that they have to be enthusiastic and that they have to convey excitement and things like that. And that is the default way of being for science communication in the popular sense, if you look at content creators on TikTok, et cetera. But [scientists] often don't think, “I wonder if anyone has studied what the best way to communicate my science is?” They don’t realize that there is a science of science communication. There is a body of research. Same thing with questions around ethics or philosophy, where you have these questions you wonder about, and people don't go look and see whether someone else has also thought about this question.

Coming to these fields with an appropriate level of humility and a curious mind, to read and start exploring what others have said about these questions as you are formulating what you yourself think about these questions, and realizing that expertise does exist and that you probably don't have it yet– that's my most basic way of giving advice about that. 

Chelsea: And networking matters, for sure– and maybe matters more than it should– but also, it can be one of the more beautiful things about it, when it happens well. But like Lucian said, don't reinvent the wheel, and don't assume that you have this brilliant thing to say that no one else has said before and then come into it with a condescending attitude. 

I also see this [happen in the other direction] with respect to scientists themselves: people coming in and saying, these scientists, they don't understand [how their work relates to philosophy, ethics, et cetera]. And of course, they actually very much do, or at least the thoughtful ones do, but that's not what they're writing about, because they're not working and publishing in the social sciences or the humanities. But a lot of them are very, very much aware of and interested in these problems. 

With respect to actual advice, especially moving forward because everything is accelerating and so volatile, and it's only gotten more so and it doesn't look like it's lessening: Be really willing to let go of dominant values in academia or in science or wherever you are. By questioning, you can see the structures that uphold them breaking a little. Look for those pressure points and look for the places where people are ready to be much more expansive and much less traditional in how they think about things. Especially if the traditions are Western academic traditions.

Lucian: And also, don't assume that everybody who has some interesting potential lens and contribution is necessarily already working in your field, like space, for example. I often think about the things that I learned from Margaret Huettl, who is a historian and Director of Indigenous Studies at University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. I reached out to her to participate in one of the [space] panels that I had at the Library of Congress because I thought that she would have interesting things to say. And she didn't answer my e-mail at first because she just assumed that I had the wrong person. And when I followed up, she was like, “Why do you want to talk to me?” I told her, “I feel like you have a lot to say about treaties that were violated when governments and private industry came together to decide that they wanted something that was in violation of that treaty. And you probably have many interesting things to say that would be applicable to the Outer Space Treaty or things like that.” And I learned a lot from her!

A little corollary to that advice is: if you're reading stuff that people have written that you particularly like, send them an e-mail. Everybody's e-mail is on fire these days, so maybe they won't get back to you, but just send them an e-mail. That way of making contact with people that are writing from perspectives or about things that you're also interested in is kind of a great way of being in touch. There are lots of people that I like to reach out to when I read a paper that is really good, or I have a question I think they might know the answer to or might have some sort of interesting lens on it.

Chelsea: And just be okay with making mistakes. Be okay with not doing everything you probably should have done, but then keep going, because everyone's [made mistakes], and it's okay. Don't find it debilitating, don't be overwhelmed. Just say, “Okay, now I know that moving forward, I need to do this and this.” And just be comfortable with the fact that you're fallible.

I was going to also ask what your advice was for more senior researchers who recognize the need for some kind of multidisciplinary initiative in their field, but don't know how to make it happen. But I feel like a lot of the advice you just gave for students is equally applicable to more senior people, especially since anytime we go interdisciplinary, we start over at the student level.

Lucian: And honestly, folks who are at the senior level need to be reminded that they need to embrace the beginner's mind a lot more than students do, because students often [already] assume that they don't know [something], and the reverse is sometimes true of folks who have been around for a while.

What do you wish the public knew or was willing to learn more about the process of SETI and the search for life going on beyond Earth?

Lucian: Something that I often emphasize with people who are not academics or scientists [but] who wonder about these things is that– Their questions are really good. Their questions like: “What's going to happen [when we discover life]? How will people react? What should we do? Should we send a message back?” All of those questions are excellent questions, and they're not questions that just have to exist in the realm of the unknown. They are things that we can, if not answer completely, we can at least begin to produce a richer understanding of through research.

And that that's kind of the whole point, to take these questions that are shared both by people that pursue their answers through research and by people who just wonder these things about the universe around them, to try and pursue deeper understandings of those questions, to ask more nuanced or pointed, sharpened questions, and to start producing some understanding of what those answers might be.

Chelsea: One really cool thing about SETI and astrobiology research is that it really motivates outside-of-the-box thinking. It really pushes us to that fault line between knowledge and ignorance. And things that we take for granted, concepts that we take for granted, natural kinds that we take for granted, they all get questioned.

But at the same time, a special thing about this kind of research about discovery is that it does stand to be transformative, but it doesn't necessarily entail positive transformations. So [it’s important that] people understand that there's a whole range of ways that discovery could happen, of features that discovery could actually have. And some of them could be really boring and mundane, and some of them could be really sensational and crazy, and some of them could be really immediately relevant, and some of them could only be relevant in the very distant future. Understanding just how broad and variable and nuanced the possibility spaces [are], and understanding that transformation isn't guaranteed to be, but might be, the kind of thing that changes what it means to be a human, at least insofar as it changes our understanding of ourselves and our place in the universe. I don't think this is guaranteed, but I think it's possible.

And with that kind of transformation, where it changes [our] identity, even at the species level, it means that we need to think about not just how to prepare for the aftermath of discovery, but also whether we want to discover the answer to this question of, are we alone? That is a prior question that we rarely, if ever, ask, but this is something we can ask. Do we want to potentially discover who we will become if we find out we're not alone in the universe? We don't necessarily get to know right now, before discovery, who will become, but we can ask right now whether we want that discovery.

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