In January 1998 I attended an International SETI Conference at the
University of Western Sydney as an STS scholar. The various science-based
and culture-based papers presented there prompted me towards some thoughts
which I have yet to formulate into a publishable form. Perhaps, I might air
them here.

Firstly, there was a debate session at this conference entitled 'Should We
Search For Extraterrestrial Life?' All the the discussants (S. Doyle, M.
Lupisella, P. Schenkel, A. Tough and P. Davies) answered in the
affirmative. Personally, I found the debate problematic since although it
was entitled as above, the real emphasis was on should we search for
INTELLIGENT extraterrestrial life. Why this fascination with
extraterrestrial INTELLIGENCE? This intellgence-centrism in SETI seems to
stem from SETI's inherent anthropocentrism...

It might be noted, for instance, that there are many non-human species on
the Earth with good claim to intelligence but SETI people only seem
interested in them from an analogy point of view, not from a
philosophical/ethical/communicative point of view. While the eyes of SETI
people are firmly affixed to the stars in the search for intelligent space
aliens, whales and apes (amongst others) continue to be devalued and
slaughtered (i.e. alienated) here on Earth. In this case one may wonder why
there is such a fascination with extraterrestrial intelligence rather than
with all kinds of intelligence. If whales/apes do not come up to scratch in
our search for non-human intelligence then we need to know why. Is it
because they don't have technology? Is it because they don't have
human-type societies? Is it because they don't have music and art? In other
words is it just because they are not human? In this way SETI researchers
may always be disappointed. What they are really looking for are
extraterrestrial humans (something they'll never find!). Should, then, SETI
be called SETU?: the Search for Extraterrestrial Us's.

        A similar point would call into focus the significance of the geographical
sites of particular SETI projects (mainly the USA, Australia and Argentina)
for not only future inter-cultural contact, but also past inter-cultural
contact. SETI fans sometimes contemplate about how European and Indigenous
cultures reacted upon meeting each other in the past to see how their
stories of such reactions might serve as working analogies as they seek
contact between Earth cultures and Extraterrestrial cultures. We might note
the irony of the situation whereby SETI considers itself on the frontier of
science as it searches for intelligent aliens.  SETI does this searching,
however, upon land that many might say was stolen from the original
occupants during the colonization of the American and Australian frontiers.


This pattern of alienating the other during the contemporanous celebration
of otherness (and de-othering of the other) may serve as a key topic of
interest in any STS work on SETI. The way SETI fans deal with such ironies
(assuming they would do so implicitly rather than explicitly) needs to be
scrutinized.

 At the UWS conference noted above the participnats heard a story lectured
at them by Frank Drake about how some arrogant (nationalistic) French
scientists in the late 19th century exposed a British space
alien-communication venture as a hoax by stating that any highly advanced,
scientifically-literate alien would communicate to Earthlings in French,
since this was the language of rationality, sophistication and civility.
(French would thus be the language that any self-respecting rational, civil
and techno-scientific alien would use). Thus we see that the French
language--a localised and contextually-dependent language--was cast by
early French SETI-thinkers as the universal language of all really
intelligent beings. But this same arrogance seems present in modern SETI,
since SETI practitioners cast Western science (and, more so, Western
mathematics) as the universal language(s) despite their context-dependency
and historical contingency.

Another cultural myth that the SETI people at this conference upheld is the
idea that technological development equals ethical development. Any alien
species which is intelligent enough to conquer interstellar radio waves is
deemed by SETI researchers as being intelligent enough not to want to
conquer less intelligent beings like humans. Here again, science and
technology are being legitimized by SETI; this time for universal progress
and benevolence rather than as a universal language. To throw doubt on this
particular SETI bias it might easily be noted how we humans act with
profound ethical dubiety towards less 'intelligent' or
'technologically-developed' creatures here on the Earth.