I think ANM's remarks are getting to some important questions.


On Sat, Jan 02, 1999 at 10:41:38PM +1100, Alan Nigel Marshall wrote:
> 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.
>

I should say, yes! But that isn't in any way scandalous. The
scandal is that those scientists haven't held the pace the
cultural imagination has developed since the early 60ies.
Meanwhile we imagine our cultural others on a much more varied
scale than the selection of radio waves as a means of
communication implies. Take any scifi thriller. Aliens
communicate directly, and they transport themselves directly
(at least some of them). Of course this is all fiction &
fantasy, but not in the sense of 'mere'.

The special relevance of SETI _is_ that it is an attempt at
communication. And communication is human, anthropocentric, if
you will. Once technological progress as the only index of a
society's progress has been put into question (which can be
done on moral or epistemological grounds but has been
effected by economical and commercial factors) the
credibility and the significance of the medium (radiowave receivers) as
the gate to our future has been greatly diminished.
I suspect some of this loss of reputation lead to the funding
cutoffs.

Ironically, the very obsolence of the technology with respect
to the cultural fantasies of extraterrestrial otherness might
keep SETI fans going --  not as an avant-garde of scientific
thought but rather as the conservative rearguard. Is that what
gives it some semblance of plausibility? Just the difference to
the overtly fantastical signified by sci-fi?

What makes SETI a "scientific" project?

Ulrich Brinkmann


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