Science, Culture, and SETI
We have traveled quite an intellectual distance in this book, moving from the historical process through which modern humans became increasingly aware of and able to imagine the existence and possible nature of extraterrestrial intelligence to some specul
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You may look in front of you, and on both sides, if you like,’ said the sheep: ’but you can’t look ALL round you—unless you’ve got eyes at the back of your head. —Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
We have traveled quite an intellectual distance in this book, moving from the historical process through which modern humans became increasingly aware of and able to imagine the existence and possible nature of extraterrestrial intelligence to some speculation, using an example from the history of anthropology, about what might happen if we do, in fact, make contact. The central thesis of my argument is that the defining feature of how our ability to contemplate ETI has grown and changed over time is tied to the ways in which culture, and the imaginaries associated with changing technological and ideational abilities and themes among humans, is experienced by scientists and the general public. There is a simple fact we need to keep in mind here. Science is embedded in cultural flows, and in the case of SETI those flows have been closely tied to ideas of technological and cultural progress that are a product of the interplay of Western religion, science, and science fiction. We have no evidence on which to build our ideas about the nature, motivations, and meanings of ETI beyond ourselves, but often our self-image is flawed or even outright mistaken. Until we make contact and have empirical evidence of their existence, we are stuck with the reality that aliens are nothing at all or if anything, nothing more than a hope and desire on the part of humans. They are phantasms, or products of the imaginary we have created © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 J.W. Traphagan, Science, Culture and the Search for Life on Other Worlds, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41745-5_6
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Science, Culture and the Search for Life on Other Worlds
to represent a hoped-for other who shares the vastness of the universe with us. But the evidence does not support their existence, nor after the limited time we have been looking does it support their absence. We simply don’t know. And it’s in that unknowing and our response to it that I see the interplay of SETI, science fiction, and religion expressed as cultural phenomena forming an imaginary allowing us to invent extraterrestrial others without much data to go on. I find it fascinating how easily humans can take a lack of information and turn it into evidence for something. A good example of this can be found in Richard Neal’s interesting article published in 2014 in the journal Risk Management in which he states that scientific evidence increasingly supports the idea of life existing elsewhere in the universe, including life on other planets in our galaxy. The evidence, according to Neal, is that we keep finding exoplanets in the goldilocks zones of other stars, which makes it increasingly unlikely that there is no life elsewhere in the universe. Unfortunately, this position is the product of a logical mistake. There is no more evidence for the existence of extraterrestrial li
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