Archaeology, Anthropology, and Interstellar Communication (original) (raw)
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Human musings about Others in faraway lands, from distant times, and on other worlds predate academic disciplines by thousands of years. The loca-tions may be different, but the questions at the heart of the matter—What do Others know of their worlds? What do They do there? How can We learn about Them?—are the same. It is not surprising, therefore, that anthropology, archaeology, and SETI share certain core issues. It is also not surprising that anthropologists/archaeologists and SETI scientists understand and address these core issues differently, given their divergent disciplinary orientations.These convergences and divergences provide a space for some very interesting interdisciplinary discussions. My primary focus in this paper is on just one of many intersections of anthropology, archaeology, and SETI: interstellar messages. I aim to highlight some assumptions about message decipherability and decipherment that appear in the SETI literature and that tend to be contradicted by anthropology and archaeology. These contradictions stem from differences in the use of Earth analogues, in frameworks regarding linguistic meaning, and in epistemological orientations. I argue that by drawing from different disciplinary traditions, we can strengthen the conceptual groundwork for interstellar message decipherment.
2013
In this article we reflect on the motives underlying the search for extraterrestrial intelligent life (SETI) with a view to show that far from turning away from Humanity it is profoundly rooted in human aspirations. We suggest that those motives derive their driving force from the fact that they combine two powerful aspirations of Humanity. On the one hand, there is the transcendental motive that drives history of science, the human enterprise that claims to escape any communitarian closure of horizon and brings our humanity to transcend itself toward the other, which was formerly referred to under the title Universal Reason. On the other hand, there is the anthropological motive by virtue of which the human being tends to project on the other and even in inanimate nature a double of himself. The mixture of both motives is deemed responsible for a remarkable bias in the current understanding of the SETI program. Despite the fact that such a program might well be aimed at any biological formation which could be arbitrarily different from all known forms, it is focused instead on a very special kind of being: beings that possess both the natural property of the type of mentality we identify with: intelligence, and the ideal one of being possible co-subjects for a Science of Nature. 1. Mixed motives for a scientific program One may have legitimate grounds for puzzlement about SETI. SETI is the acronym of a research program to detect optical or radio signals as a communication with intelligent beings inhabiting the planets of stars other than our Sun. That research has been unsuccessful to date despite the progress already made in two areas. On one hand, progress has been made in the astronomical identification of exoplanets located in the habitable zone of their stars. The observatory satellite Kepler dedicated to the hunt for exoplanets has allowed identification of over a thousand candidates for the status of telluric exoplanets awaiting confirmation from telescopic observation on Earth. On the other hand, progress has been made in the detection of trace physicochemical components of life in space (biosignatures). The analysis of the light spectrum of exoplanets orbiting their star (so far only uninhabitable planets more like a hot gaseous Jupiter than like Earth) has made possible the determination of the chemical composition of the atmosphere of a few of those exoplanets, revealing the
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) in the Optical Spectrum II, SPIE Proceedings, 1996
A review of the different proposals made to establish contact with hypothetical neighbors is presented. For almsot 100 years (1822-1921) the dominant paradigm for signaling extraterrestrial beings, was based on the exchange of light nbeam signals. After the success of wireless transatlantic communications and the discovery of radio signals from the cosmos, the main scientific proposals to contact extraterrestrials were based on radio waves. Nevertheless, the development of lasers and other non-linear optical devices, led into a new set of proposals to use them for intreplanetary and interstellar communication means. A review of these proposals and the detection of extraterrestrial technological activities in the optical domain is made. A summary of the requirements need to explore the astrophysics of shortest timescales is described, in order to develop the nano and sub-nanosecond detectors that could be used to discover interstellar pulsed laser signals.