Q&A: The Anthropology of Searching for Aliens
Before we can understand an alien civilization, it might be useful to understand our own.
To help in this task, anthropologist Kathryn Denning of York University in Toronto, Canada studies the very human way that scientists, engineers and members of the public think about space exploration and the search for alien life.
From Star Trek to SETI, our modern world is constantly imagining possible futures where we dart around the galaxy engaging with bizarre alien races. Denning points out that when people talk about these futures, they often invoke the past. But they frequently seem to have a poor understanding of history.
For instance, in September at the 100 Year Starship Conference — a symposium created by DARPA for thinking about long-term spaceflight goals — Denning noted that the conference was framed as an extension of old traditions of exploration, for example mentioning Ferdinand Magellan as an exemplary hero who circumnavigated the globe. Not only did Magellan not circumnavigate the globe (he was dismembered in the Philippines before finishing the task), his mission was not entirely laudable.
“It’s easy to forget that it’s also a story of slavery, war, betrayal, hardship, violence, and death — not just to those who signed up for the journey, but a lot of innocent bystanders,” Denning said during a talk March 30 at the Contact Conference, an annual meeting dedicated to speculation about SETI and space exploration. The misuse of the past matters when thinking about the future, she added, because it deludes people, giving them a poor understanding of how history actually moves.
Wired spoke to Denning about contact with extraterrestrials, the rhetoric of the Space Age, and what it means to be human in the universe.
Wired: What does the field of anthropology bring to thinking about space exploration and SETI?
Kathryn Denning: Anthropologists are good at looking at discourses, and the stories that people tell to structure their lives and their behavior. So there are anthropologists working on the discourse surrounding interstellar flight. And anthropologists have always worked on the phenomenon of UFO abductions and aliens on Earth and that sort of stuff.
With respect to SETI, one of the main contributions is just grounding all of that speculation about other civilizations in actual physical data. In terms of civilization or civilizations, we only have one example — Earth.
And there’s a lot of data here, which has been very poorly mined so far. If people are drawing generalizations about civilizations elsewhere in the universe that don’t even hold here on Earth, then maybe we should throw them out.
Wired: What are some instances of wrong ideas about civilization that get invoked in talking about extraterrestrials?
Denning: I think one good example is the variable of L, the lifetime of civilizations, which dominates the Drake equation. [An estimate of the number of intelligent extraterrestrials that could exist in our galaxy.]
The speculation on this has been frankly goofy sometimes. I mean you can make up basically any value of L that you like and justify it in some way. So people say we should try to use Earth’s data to look at it. We should ask what really does cause civilizations to collapse or revert to a lower order of complexity or technological regime.
And, well, we’re still working that one out actually. We have so much work to do and I think that’s important for people to understand that our models of civilization here on Earth are not as solid as popular culture frequently assumes them to be.
Similarly, many people hold outdated ideas regarding scenarios of contact. We have our iconic case studies, such as Columbus landing in the Americas or Cortez and the Aztecs. But most of those have been revamped with additional historical work in even just the last 30 or 40 years.
So when I hear that standard model of Columbus or Cortez, frankly I want to roll my eyes. For example [Steven] Hawking says — interminably and repeatedly — that when Columbus showed up in the Americas, well, that didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans. And therefore we should similarly be worried about trying to attract the attention of an alien civilization.
The problem is that it tends to misrepresent Earth’s history. These stories get invoked in models of contact with an alien society, but it’s a biased retelling of Earth’s history and it’s usually not a very good one.
The underlying narrative there is that it went poorly for the Native Americans because they were the inferior civilization. And, by extension, it would go poorly for us because the other party would be the superior civilization. But that simply wasn’t the case for the Native Americans.
One of the reasons I do the work I do is to try and have people get the history a little bit straighter.