To weed out biases and enhance the quest to find life somewhere among the stars, StellarHistory argues, SETI’s practitioners must find a way to “decolonize” their field. (By CamiloAGarzonC)
Since time immemorial, humans have looked to the heavens above to make sense of life below, right here on Earth. What else is out there among all the countless galaxies, stars and planets? Are we truly alone in the universe? Such questions are crucial for establishing humanity’s cosmic context and have inspired a variety of speculative answers from a wide range of philosophical and scientific traditions. Buddhists believe in different Buddhas living in different worlds.
Scientific American spoke to Charbonneau about decolonization, SETI’s feedback loop with its own context and history, and how combating cultural biases in the search for alien life can be a case study for similar reforms in other STEM fields.“Decolonization” seems to be a problematic term, in part because it carries so much historical baggage and is used in many different ways across many different fields. Finding consensus about what it actually means is challenging, to say the least.
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.
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.
People in general get frustrated when they hear statements such as “concepts of civilization and intelligence are socially constructed.” It seems confusing and puzzling. It makes it seem like things aren’t real. But actually it’s the inverse. Words and socially constructed things are real because we are a verbal, social species. Things that are socially created still have a real-world impact; they’re not imaginary. So when it comes to “decolonizing SETI,” the metaphors do matter too.
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