HONOLULU — Our hunt for aliens has a potentially fatal flaw — we're the ones searching for them.
That's
a problem because we're a unique species, and alien-seeking scientists
are an even stranger and more specialized bunch. As a result, their
all-too human assumptions may get in the way of their alien-listening
endeavors. To get around this, the
Breakthrough Listen project, a $100-million initiative scouring the cosmos for signals of otherworldly beings as part of the
Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), is asking anthropologists to help unmask some of these biases.
"It's
kind of a joke at Breakthrough Listen," Claire Webb, an anthropology
and history of science student at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, said here on Jan. 8 at the 235th meeting of the American
Astronomical Society (AAS) in Honolulu. "They tell me: 'We're studying
aliens, and you're studying us.'"
Since 2017, Webb has worked with Breakthrough Listen to examine how
SETI researchers think about aliens, produce knowledge, and perhaps
inadvertently place anthropocentric assumptions into their work.
She sometimes describes her efforts as "making the familiar strange."
For
instance, your life might seem perfectly ordinary — maybe involving
being hunched over at a desk and shuttling electrons around between
computers — until examined through an anthropological lens, which points
out that this is not exactly a universal state of affairs. At the
conference, Webb presented a poster looking at how Breakthrough Listen
scientists use
artificial intelligence (AI) to sift through large data sets and try to uncover potential
technosignatures, or indicators of technology or tool use by alien organisms.
"Researchers
who use AI tend to disavow human handicraft in the machines they
build," Webb told Live Science. "They attribute a lot of agency to those
machines. I find that somewhat problematic and at the worst untrue."
Any
AI is trained by human beings, who present it with the types of signals
they think an intelligent alien might produce. In doing so, they
predispose their algorithms to certain biases. It can be incredibly
difficult to recognize such thinking and overcome its limitations, Webb
said.
Most SETI research assumes some level of commensurability,
or the idea that beings on different worlds will understand the universe
in the same way and be able to communicate about it with one another,
Webb said. Much of this research, for example, presumes a type of
technological commensurability, in which aliens broadcast messages using
the same radio telescopes we have built, and that we will be able to
speak to them using a universal language of science and math.
But how universal is our language of science, and how inevitable is
our technological evolution? Do alien scientists gather in large
buildings and present their work to one another via slides and lectures
and posters? And what bearing do such
human rituals have on the types of scientific knowledge researchers produce?
It
was almost like trying to take the perspective of a creature on another
planet, who might wonder about humanity and our odd modern-day
practices. "If E.T. was looking at us, what would they see?" Webb
asked.
The assumptions and anxieties of alien-hunters can creep
in in other ways. Because of the vast distances involved in sending a
signal through space, many SETI researchers have imagined receiving a
message from an older technological society. As astronomer and science
popularizer Carl Sagan famously said in his 1980 book and television
series "Cosmos," that might mean E.T. has lived through a "
technological adolescence" and survived nuclear proliferation or an apocalyptic climate meltdown.
But
those statements are based on the specific anxieties of our era, namely
nuclear war and climate change, and we can't automatically assume that
the history of another species will unfold in the same way, Webb said.
Veteran
SETI scientist Jill Tarter has told Webb that, in some ways, we are
looking for a better version of ourselves, speculating that a message
from the heavens will include blueprints for a device that can provide
cheap energy and help alleviate poverty.
The ideal of progress is
embedded in such narratives, Webb said, first of scientific and
technological progress, but also an implicit assumption of moral
advancement. "It's the idea that, as your technology develops, so does
your sense of ethics and morality," she said. "And I think that's
something that can be contested."
Even our hunt for organisms like ourselves suggests "a yearning for connectivity, reflective to me of a kind of
postmodern loneliness and isolation in the universe," she said.
Webb
joked that SETI researchers don't always understand the point of her
anthropological and philosophical examinations. But, she said, they are
open to being challenged in their ideas and knowing that they are not
always seeing the whole picture.
"One thing Jill [Tarter] has
said many times is, 'We reserve the right to get smarter,'" she said.
"We are doing what we think makes sense now, but we might one day be
doing something totally different."
Ultimately, the point of this
work is to get SETI researchers to start "noticing human behavior in
ways that could push SETI to do novel kinds of searches," Webb said.
"Inhabiting other mindscapes is potentially a very powerful tool in
cultivating new ways to do science."
Perhaps beings on another
planet might use gravitational waves, or neutrinos, or even some other
unknown aspect of reality we have yet to come across to send messages
into the heavens.
Adam Mann
Source News
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