Diverse Aliens

• Diverse Aliens: Enriching the assumptions informing SETI through an interdisciplinary approach

• Project type = 1

• Members: Amanda Gregory, Aramis D. M. Valverde, Marius Dorobantu, Michael Garfield, Zbigniew Słuszkiewicz

• Description of the project

Current SETI efforts are informed by a set of explicit and implicit philosophical/scientific assumptions that are inherently limited (e.g. by the fact that the people who devise them come from similar disciplines or share a rather similar cultural background). A first goal of our paper is to identify such potential blind spots in the current approaches.

What if advanced ETIs are more interested in aesthetics or spirituality, rather than technology and resource acquisition? What if their existence in space-time occurs differently than our own? What would we be then looking for, instead of radio signals or bio-chemical signatures? A second goal of our paper is to tease out such imaginative proposals, informed by a wider set of disciplines and human experiences.