Post-Detection Futures
Risk and Imagination
Risk and Imagination
edited by Carol and Kate, jointly written by John, David, Kate, George, Daliah, Kurt, Carol, Andjelka, Kate, Emily, Chelsea
Web links to support the workshop:
The Hub's NASA DARES White Paper
PDF of the House of Lords Space Committee Written Submission
UK's National Risk Register 2025
The Hub's Zotero:
Please email Daliah for an invitation to the Hub's Zotero group @seti_pd_hub
Rather than following a traditional conference format, July's Post-Detection Futures: Risk and Imagination workshop took a hands-on approach and welcomed members into a future-oriented workshop to work on readiness through various approaches to risk and imagination, including theoretical frameworks, participatory tools and the Post-Detection Toolkit.
Saturday Morning Public Session [video recording]
Introduction from John
Meeting in-person somehow feels like a privilege, these days, with so much interaction [team / face time] conducted online. I suppose, it always has been so – travelling to attend meetings was treated as the norm, when [university] funds were far more readily available. So, after 2 years of virtual Hub discussions, debate, and [research] development, it was good (and words fail me, to adequately describe the positive atmosphere of the meeting) to gather together for a few days, to discuss and develop our ideas for the future - focusing on themes of futures, risks, imagination, communication, intelligence, and life. The Hub was created to address gaps in existing post-discovery research and the workshop certaintly brought together diverse expertise, combining engineering and philosophy to futures research, computational modelling and speculative fictions, to tackle the question of the "unknown unknowns". Downtime and fun were also essential additional ingredients that were much in evidence – whether running around in a walled garden, attached to our meeting room, during a LARP session (well Kate did most of the running), or relaxing in a pub garden at the end of the day’s sessions. All fuel for the creative ‘juices’.
I started proceedings off with an overview on origins and orientation, grounding in historical perspectives considering life beyond earth, early NASA and the inauguration of the SETI Institute and the first post-detection protocols from Jill Tarter and co., as well as the ultimately short-lived Post Detection Task Force that was hosted by the IAU. The thrust of the meeting was aimed however at the future challenges we vace now in a very different technological time. From Chelsea Haramia's careful framing of moral standing and the question of intelligence, to Prof. Josep Call (co-lead of the University of St Andrews Diverse Intelligence Research Centre) presented some of his related work on “Speaking to Other Minds”. A very interesting session, foundational questions that prompting some of us to even challenge definitions of intelligence and life and consider radically new frameworks and strategies, and turbo boosting many conversations across the morning’s agenda. Lots of potential for the future. For the remaining sessions (both Saturday and Sunday), I leave it to those who led them (a huge thanks to all for the hard work in preparing and delivering these sessions) to reflect upon below. I can only reiterate some of my summing up words at the end of the workshop – this was one of the most enjoyable and interesting meetings I (and many others in attendance) had ever been involved in, energising us for many future endeavours.
Focused, collective efforts like this are essential for moving the field forward in a way that matters and we plan for this to be an annual event, and we will pursue financial support for next year's meeting, to aid more travelling to Scotland to attend.
Andjelka
Just days before the Hub's workshop, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory released its first-light images, offering a glimpse into a new era of discovery. This moment marked a turning point in observational astronomy: the beginning of a new era of dynamic Universe and a growing scientific demand to prepare for the detection of 'unknowns', including the "unknown unknowns" and traces of life beyond Earth that the Hub focuses on.
Rubin is observing a unique cosmic habitability window, a period following the peak of star formation, when conditions are especially favourable for life to emerge and be detectable, just as the accelerating universe begins to isolate galaxies. With Rubin, JWST, and future missions, astronomy now has the 'cosmic haystack accelerators' to search for biosignatures, technosignatures, and unexplained anomalies on an unprecedented scale.
In response, the Post-Detection Futures Workshop took a proactive role in the new configuration of astronomical landscape, bringing together experts across disciplines to develop tools for post-detection of life indicative signals readiness, grounded in the real ambiguities of astronomical signals. These tools did not assume that a signal will be clean, obvious, or even intelligible. They considered the possibility that detection might be ambiguous, noisy, or hidden in unexpected channels, optical, infrared, gravitational, or quantum. By integrating cognitive science, humanities and non-human communication, the workshop reframed such detection not as an endpoint, but as the beginning of a new, proactive scientific and societal endeavour.
Happily, over the month our NASA DARES White Paper was covered in the media, first at Astrobiology.com, and also MSN, UniverseToday, phys.org and the french site astrounivers. You can read it here: https://astrobiology.com/2025/07/seti-post-detection-futures-directions-for-technosignature-research-and-readiness.html The Hub workshop took up the Paper's aim through exploring what it is like to be more than a passive observer of the cosmos, but a participatory player learning with others to better understand one of the greatest questions humanity may ever face, and to build the capacity for a proactive response.
Josep’s introduction to animal communication and cognition in the plenary gave a whistle-stop tour through understanding animal cognition and communication, with insights into the varied sensory systems of dogs, chimpanzees, and dolphins’ echolocation, and lintered on the strangely alien design of plants, which yet still communicate in ways that we can recognise through the roots and through chemicals through the air, such as releasing chemical signals to reveal the presence of predators to other plants, and AI.
The call for clarified approach to information, intelligence, and communication - what are the key attributes? And how can we begin to approach motive programmatically and systematically? If motive is a crucial factor in communication between different organisms, can we think in more nuanced ways of how to study motive that underpins the reason or intention behind communicative acts? For example, we might consider that it is useful to distinguish between an imperative motive, the underlying desire that a communicator wants, and the declarative motive, a communicator wanting to draw attention to something. What other dimensions of this can we think about? What are the links to moral questions here? Lastly, how can we think of learning and adaptation, which does not necessarily need to be cognitive, in relation to more than human life, and even the discovery of more than human life?
Josep offered the Umwelt (via Jacob von Huexel), the uniquely rich and variagated perceptual world each organism is granted by the specific pool of sensing, as a way into thinking about the complexity of more-than-human worlds and the fine-grained distinctions we can make in defining diverse sensory systems and different ways of handling and managing information and communication. The human perceptual world is a slither of the world that is. This opening of the imagination from the small part of the electromagnetic spectrum that creatures on earth make use of, gesturing towards animals who may see, hear, or smell things qualitatively differently, opened up fresh imaginings of detection situations and the flexibility of signals. Rich knowledge on species sensing and communication led to a conversation that pushed at the limits of what is known and included gravitational and quantum modalities as well as the electromagnetic spectrum.
The Workshop aimed to grow understanding between Working Groups and support healthy collaborative relationships within the research community and with real-world institutions to address the urgent challenges and emerging opportunities of post-detection.
Define post-detection futures research and gain consensus for mission statement
Actively work together to develop interdisciplinary frameworks and create tools for scenario-building, public engagement, and readiness across sectors.
Advance plural and inclusive approaches to intelligence, communication and risk.
Kate, Emily and George
If you have attended the Post-Detection Hub meetings, you will know how vital imagination is to the methods we are developing together. The Imagination workshop was both a celebration of George’s long-standing stewardship of the Scenarios Working Group and an invitation to remix the material, thinking alongside the more-than-human world in Scotland, a land rich with ecological memory. Our days were framed by fresh walks along the sea, full of little moments of encounter, coaxing an imperious heron from a car bonnet, or being joined in the closing session by two stern and vocal seagulls. Animal fill the old stories of Scotland: seals and red deer, seabirds and Highland cows, creatures who share the land and sea and shape ways of knowing.
The workshop was an opportunity to grow the Post-Detection Toolkit collectively: to stress-test ideas, share methods, and invite new communities into the work. The SETI Post-Detection Toolkit is envisioned as a living resource, a pluralistic approach that values multiple perspectives and ways of knowing. By combining future scenarios with alternative detection situations, it offers a tool that can actively support the research community in anticipating post-detection responses. From the beginning, this scenario work has aimed to cultivate an ecology of speculations, not a single best guess. To meet this aim the toolkit must always be open-ended and welcoming of ongoing reflection, feedback, critique and reworking.
One nice outcome of the July workshop is the working relationship between the Scenarios and Imagination WGs, and an interest in whether we could “translate” cultural moments - both fictional and historical - for the Post-Detection Toolkit. Can we explore translating moments from fiction and historical SETI “false alarms” into structured Toolkit entries? There was shared enthusiasm to explore examples like Jocelyn Bell Burnell’s discovery of pulsars, Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds, and Kate Bush’s Experiment IV and a sense that collective input is what makes it possible to build a living archive that genuinely welcomes plural stories, fictions and histories that extend beyond UK, USA and European contexts. While care for intellectual property is essential and not all fictional narratives will align with the toolkit’s aim to imagine scientifically possible, if not probable, futures for 2050, offering this participation via a wiki, as a kind of citizen-science experiment enriched by the creativity of many, can greatly broaden the imaginative scope of the Toolkit’s archive as a shared research resource. However, offering this participation via a wiki as a kind of citizen-science experiment enriched by the creativity of many can really broaden the imaginative scope of the Toolkit’s archive as a shared research resource.
The afternoon of the workshop was dedicated to play. Play is not such a trivial matter. It helped us understand the tools we were building and relax fixed expectations about the future and how things should be done, making space for the unexpected to emerge. Scenario work depends on curiosity. Learning through improvisation, whether play testing the Live Action Roleplay (LARP) outdoors or through digital interaction with the AI tool, offered distinct ways of engaging with uncertainty. The conversations between these two approaches were lively and provoked a rich dialogue on bringing together relational dynamics and randomness and post-detection preparedness.
The true value of this imaginative work lies not only in its outputs but in the relational knowledge and mutual learning it cultivates. It was a joy to celebrate two and a half years of running the Hub together, and to be reminded of how deeply generosity shapes the work we are doing. The time in Scotland was characterised by attentive listening, inviting others to share expertise, and a dedication to care throughout. These imaginative processes are worth sharing, and we look forward to doing so with the PSETI community in August, in a meeting that brings together researchers with deep expertise and long histories in SETI and technosignatures, and where we value the opportunity to further shape the speculative tools the Hub is creating.
David Keir
At the live PD Hub Workshop in July, I began by introducing the approach of orienting one strand of work towards the main perceived Post-Detection risks - from, initially, a UK point of view. This is bearing in mind the need to attract funding into the PD Hub for at least some project work.
This strand is different from, and complementary to, the Futures strand of work, led by George Profitiliotis over the last two years.
It is conventional in major hazards risk assessment to distinguish, early on, the main risks from the minor ones. I explained the two conventional bases of "risk"; Likelihood and Consequences. So, perceived vanishingly unlikely events, or events with minimal expected impact can be de-prioritised in favour of the most credible and the most impactful scenarios.
I then talked about the UK National Risk Register - which has been around, and updated by a Government task force - for about fifteen years. It includes all sorts of risks; Natural disasters like flooding, acts of terrorism, cyber attacks etc.
But it does not include SETI post-detection in any way.
In a departure from the main business of the day, I also then pointed out the existence of the UK Five Eyes agreement; Which means an established system for sharing of UK classified intelligence (particularly about terrorism and other major risks) with the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. This should be borne in mind in our field too.
I re-capped the work completed so far by the Impacts and Risks Working Group. This has consisted of collecting together the opinions of WG members in answer to the Key Question: " What, in your opinion, are the most important risks we need to think about and try to evaluate?"
Those raw responses are stored in a private folder, accessible only by myself at present.
This information has been entered into a table called a Risk Register, all in a common format. This includes columns headed "unique risk identifier", "Initiator", "who and what is at risk", "consequences", and "number Hub contributors proposing this", as well as more unformatted "comments".
The main activity then, for the live group at St Andrews was to "brainstorm" around the same Key Question - about the risks we should be studying. The aim being to further expand, populate and update the PD Hub Risk Register.
The results of this group exercise were recorded in real time on flip charts/white boards. The idea was to be inclusive and comprehensive - and imaginative within the bounds of credibility.
The exercise was fruitful, energising and very valuable. Undoubtedly, the workshop of the previous day (including discussion of non-human life, intelligences and communication, and a taster Live Action Role Play) had laid the groundwork for a relaxed, fast-moving and open discussion.
Many possible detection scenarios were put forward and recorded, and a fair percentage of these we had not collected before into the Risk Register. They will be processed and broken down for entry into a new version of that table in the next couple of months.
I then made an informal presentation of what could be the next stage of using the data - deconstruction of the risk scenarios using Boolean logic diagrams. I also explained how these could be used to mathematically test hypothetical situations- and systems of counter-measures, to discover what were the dominant underlying factors of some of the risks, what were common factors and where the most effort to reduce risks would count the most.
Addressing the paucity of relevant data, even of simple root causes, I pointed out that this was the case for very many existential and other major hazards in the world today; And that order-of-magnitude estimates of likelihood and consequences, were often enough to allow for comparison work.
Chelsea’s session drew out the philosophical and ethical complexities of defining intelligence in the context of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).
The provocation was clear, as a community we must eschew simplistic modes of speaking about complex issues of intelligence. Clear head thinking is needed to distinguish between necessary and sufficient conditions when reasoning about intelligence and technology.
Chelsea analysed how SETI has used technology as a proxy for intelligence historically, urging that we now take up these issues with more caution. The problem is that the presence of technology may be a sufficient condition to infer intelligence, but it is not a necessary one. Josep Call’s presentation on animals emphasised how there can indeed be intelligence without technology across the non-human animal world. Researcher David Delgado Shorter directly critiques the way in which SETI scientists approach technology as a simple extension and necessary condition for intelligence and draw out how this is rooted in a history of colonial violence against Indigenous peoples and ways of knowing and the control and marginalisation of those deemed less “intelligent”.
In practice, SETI scientists like Andrew Siemion at Breakthrough Listen treat technology as a sufficient, but not necessary, indicator of intelligence. But it must be still foregrounded that simplistic assumptions about “intelligence” have justified exclusion or mistreatment with horrific outcomes in human history.
The SETI research community needs to learn from the past and keep front and foremost the awareness of the historical misuse of the concept of intelligence. We need to more precisely analyse concepts and collectively develop approaches that resist assumptions that technology is essential for intelligence or that intelligence is the only basis for moral status.
We need to take up more inclusive approaches and find ways to acknowledge the full diversity and complexity of life on earth, human histories and the processes that shape our concepts in science and society, as a way of opening to possible life beyond.
Post-Detection Scenario Toolkit: A flexible framework for exploring future discoveries, designed to handle uncertainty and highlight the significance of context, governance, and international collaboration. Tested during the workshop, the toolkit uses a four-scenario method (from Dator's futures methods) to intentionally maximise difference between plausible futures. By enabling work with divergent possibilities, including those beyond current expectations, it helps build collective capacity for response across varied publics and disciplines.
Post-Detection LARP: A participatory scenario tool using Live Action Role Play (LARP) to test and share the Post-Detection Scenarios Toolkit. It invites diverse participants into structured, speculative play, through improvisation, collective sense-making, and problem-solving under time pressure to engage with the uncertainty and ambiguity of post-detection as a process.
Post-Detection Risk Register: An extension to the UK National Risk Register, designed to integrate scenarios involving the discovery of extraterrestrial life. It adapts existing civil contingency frameworks to account for high-uncertainty, low-probability events, outlining protocols for governance, communication, and public response in the event of confirmed or ambiguous signals.
Diagnostic AI tool for post-detection scenarios: An AI-driven scenario tool modeled on clinical diagnostic systems. It uses anomaly detection and protocol logic, similar to those in medical imaging, to identify, categorize, and guide responses to unexpected findings in post-detection contexts. Designed for training and decision support, the tool draws from forensic and clinical practice to provide structured pathways for interpreting novel signals and coordinating appropriate follow-up actions.
The Post-Detection Toolkit as "Recipe book"
George
The work so far has involved extensive collaborative development: horizon scanning, identifying trends and uncertainties, constructing four contrasting pre-detection scenarios, and generating a set of randomly combined detection situations for use in workshops or simulations.
The penny dropped for many with the idea that the Post-Detection Scenario Toolkit is a recipe book for Post-Detection. Different recipes work with different ingredients, and the scenario templates and pre-detection vignettes have different flavours and uses, though they are all designed to help communities across disciplines and expertise explore possible futures following a SETI detection.
Like preparing food, to make the meal nutritious a cook is needed to attentively combine the ingredients and make the meal. The Toolkit relies on this combination and adaption to specific, situated contexts by a facitilitaor: this renders the scenarios toolkit useful and has it function as a practical epistemic tool capable of provoking collective reflection and critical thinking about varied possibilities in the face of “unknown unknowns”.
The workshop gave the understanding of the toolkit as a hybrid, participatory, and open-ended experiment much like cooking, and as such entirely reliant on human input and collaboration to transform the instructions into learning that can satisfy. Over two years we have worked to provide a set of tested, adaptable, neutral scenario ingredients; the facilitators role is to shape them into context-rich and varied situated experiences. In the workshop we explored how to bring to life the Toolkit through the creative decisions of facilitators and participants through an outdoor LARP and an AI narrative tool. Though very different and non identical, it was interesting to see the analogue, improvisatory experiments of the LARP dialogue with the AI tool's quick fire generation of an unfolding "choose your own adventure" type of narrative game played by individuals via their smartphones.
Kate
All Worlds, All Times is a Live Action Role Play (LARP): a playful way to imagine how we might respond if we discovered life beyond Earth. Through a story structured by NASA’s Golden Record, it invites people to step into future scenarios and explore communication in emerging, uncertain and ambiguous situations.
The St Andrews gardens held the first outing of this work, created by Kate Genevieve, Theresa Fisher, George Profitiliotis, and Andjelka Kovacevic, with input from members of the Order of the Octopus, a network for early-career researchers in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). In the playtest, groups worked with the Toolkit’s four 2050 scenarios and came up with wildly different responses. Some groups favoured open and proactive communication; others argued for caution and sometimes extreme control. In every future, misinformation and mistrust created cahllenges, and ideas about “transparency” varied widely depending on context. Role-playing fictional situations offered a few glimpses of how differently people might respond, and the kind of relational learning that can come out of creative practice. The next outing will be at PSETI. Please join if you are attending.
Andrew
I presented a new generative AI-based tool designed to help decision-makers, policymakers, and government leaders explore the implications of a positive SETI detection. The simulator, built using OpenAI’s custom GPT functionality, integrates scenario structures developed by the Hub’s own Scenarios Working Group, led by George, and allows users to interactively role-play plausible societal, political, and scientific responses to contact.
The project is now entering its next phase: seeking funding to expand its scope and fidelity, and identifying opportunities to present it directly to political leaders and government agencies in the UK. By providing a safe, exploratory environment to engage with high-impact uncertainty, this tool aims to support better preparedness and more informed strategic thinking in the event of contact.
Dahlia
As one of the newer members of the Hub, I came to the Hub Workshop mostly to listen and absorb as much as I could. I left feeling inspired and grateful for the conversations I got to be a part of. Over the two days, we covered everything from philosophical questions about intelligence to legal and governance challenges to the potential role of AI simulations in post-detection scenarios. What stood out the most to me was the genuinely interdisciplinary nature of the group and how open everyone was to engage with different perspectives. I’m really thankful to have been a part of it and am excited to keep learning from this amazing community. Thank you to everyone who made it such a welcoming and energizing experience!
SETI Hub Provocation
Kurt Mills
5 July 2025
I want to touch on one of the main areas of my work – global governance broadly conceived. That is, how do we manage the multitude of relationships and policy issues relevant in the international sphere? In a sense it means doing what governments do domestically but on a much wider and more complicated scale internationally. And as work on global governance has developed, it is very clear that we are talking about actors and relationships far beyond just formally constituted governmental entities, even as governments attempt to keep legitimate authority to themselves. In other words, who should/does/can make decisions? This is obviously relevant to SETI post-detection. While we talk about how to respond, a prior question is who responds – and who decides how to respond. Kathryn Denning has thought about this a lot more than I have, and she notes that whether or not to respond is ‘fundamentally a social question about global citizenship.’ And here we have questions of legitimacy as well as practicality.
On the question of legitimacy, theoretically, the United Nations should be the most legitimate actor to make decisions on how to respond to a SETI detection, since it represents all (or at least most) of humanity, if in significantly problematic ways. However, its legitimacy has been challenged on both representative legitimacy grounds and effectiveness. Many populations around the world have no voice, including populations who are ruled by authoritarian governments, where citizenries have little meaningful say in how they are governed. And given its great moral failure in Gaza and elsewhere, does the UN still have the same claim to legitimacy? Or are these moral failures a fundamental feature of a necessarily imperfect institution? And of course the UN is not one single thing. Are we talking about the General Assembly as the most legitimately representative? Or the Security Council, with its severely compromised claims to any sort of global legitimacy? Any SETI discovery will inevitably be partially framed as a security issue, but is this correct framing?
While the UN is potentially – if still problematically – the most legitimate decision-maker, it is far from clear that it is the most practical or effective. Politically fractured, with 193 members states and 2 non-member observer states, it is a cumbersome decision making body. Imagine the bedlam that would erupt if the President of the General Assembly announced that an alien technosignature had been verified, and the GA had to decide what to do! Perhaps, then, we should look to the legitimacy-compromised Security Council. Surely it would be easier for 15 states to chart a path forward than 193. Yet, given the presence of the Big 5 states and the veto, decision making is still extremely fraught. Could decision making be delegated to COPUOS? 104 members states is not necessarily qualitatively different than 193, and anyway are we necessarily talking about the peaceful uses of outer space? And would the UN Human Rights Council also have a role to play in debating what rights an intelligence of unknown characteristics might have? If a detection required an immediate response, it is unclear whether the UN would be up to the job. However, if an immediate response was not required, the slow processes of the UN could be useful in processing what will be a fundamentally challenging discovery.
Regional organizations may sometimes have a greater claim to both representative legitimacy and effectiveness, given they are smaller and closer to the represented populations, but issues still arise, and of course they cannot claim global representation. What happens when a multiplicity of types of regional actors stake a claim of representation? Certainly it would be chaos if the EU, NATO, the African Union, and ASEAN, for example, all decided they had a right to decide how to respond.
Indeed, while regional organizations might be able to make decisions more quickly, in practical terms they are only making them for themselves, and different regions will have different capabilities, and may come to different conclusions that will be at odds with each other but which will affect everybody.
States have greater claims to representation for specific populations, although democratic concerns still arise. And leaving it up to each individual state to decide how to respond is just a reversion to global anarchy.
It is possible – and given current global dynamics very likely – that individuals states, in particular powerful ones like the US and China, will decide on their own how to respond to a detection, based on their understanding of their own interests. This will lead to easier decision making and quicker reaction times, but will not necessarily lead to a better and more coherent global outcome. They would be making decisions that will affect all of humanity based on their own individual state interests which may well conflict with the interests of the rest of the world.
These are all formally constituted political entities, but can other entities or groupings also make a claim to legitimately represent humanity? The scientists who contribute to the SETI project obviously have the most direct knowledge of how to identify a signal, and what the practical implications might be. And surely the scientific endeavour is global, intended to benefit all of humanity. Yet, even if working for the good of humanity, scientists will not have a legitimate political mandate on their own to decide how to respond. And since much scientific activity is funded and/or directed by states, we must call into question the global neutrality of the scientific community, or at least aspects of it – even if the scientific community see itself as politically neutral. And some elements will not. Obviously they should have a seat at the table, but cannot constitute the table themselves.
But they will have a few decisions to make. Do they tell the world what they found? Given that the foundations of the scientific endeavour are openness and transparency, this might seem like an easy call. But the governments funding and overseeing this research might not see it that way, and may try to restrict and compartmentalize information. Yet, it does not seem conceivable that word would not eventually leak out. Beyond this, the decision, of course, is whether to respond – i.e. send a message which will reveal our presence. And we really have no idea what the risks of responding would be. Given this uncertainty, again I’m not sure scientists on their own should make decisions that could affect the potential future of humanity.
And then, of course, there is the global public, supposedly represented by states at the UN, but with many perspectives that clash with the positions of state leaders. Is there any possible way to include the views of 8 billion people directly in any decision making process? Many theoretical models have been constructed to include public opinion in global decision making on a variety of issues through, for example, adding an additional debating chamber in the UN for democratically chosen individuals or global citizen assemblies. Most have come to naught. And one can imagine the utter chaos that would result in some sort of citizen’s assembly focused on the question of how to respond to a SETI signal.
Multinational corporations have no legitimacy when it comes to making decisions on how to respond to respond to a detection. As entities whose purpose is to maximize shareholder value, and who frequently act directly against the interests of the greater good of humanity, such private entities have no legitimate claim to decide how and when to respond to a detection. But it seems quite possible that some might decide it is in their own interests to take action. Certainly a corporate leader like Elon Musk will have the hubris to think they know better than the rest of the world how to respond. And they may imagine a way to make extraordinary profit from being in contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence – however speculative and practically dubious this may be – and thus may take it upon themselves to send a message or else use the information of the detection for their own purposes.
Nobody could stop them. And that's part of the point here. If a state, or corporation, or individual wanted to send out a message, it would be really difficult to stop them. And we have no idea what the potential consequences might be. Perhaps the Three Body Problem should be a cautionary tale – or not.
But METI is not the only possible response. I mentioned the potential securitization of a SETI signal, which could very possibly lead to a massive expansion of intelligence and military capabilities focused on repelling an imagined alien invasion, however unlikely that might be. And those capabilities, once developed, could quite possible be deployed against enemies here on Earth – whether international or domestic. And this could be one of the greatest unintended consequences of SETI detection. Beyond the risks coming from out there, an even greater threat could come from here on Earth. Humanity has a worrying record of turning potential threats back on itself.
My short provocation has not been intended to resolve anything. Rather, I hope I’ve thrown out a couple of questions for further reflection – questions that should perhaps be considered across our discussions in the Hub.
Above all, the in-person meeting reminded us that inquiry is never only technical. Risk is approached differently all around the world depending on environment, culture, governance norms, and the same to for communication, imagination and the future itself.
And grew a dedication to supporting post-detection Hubs across the planet toward growing an ongoing research, knowledge culture of many sovereign centres, from the USA to Indonesia.
The Hub has a Code of Care, developed over the past year, which reflects the values guiding the work: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1p-lbY3BIE8UfS6nqEgt8ilnB2p4rgy2Z/edit#heading=h.y3wn7hhfs7k3 Conversations about the idea of post-detection hubs around the world, sovereign research centres collaborating across distances, and about what it would take to nurture such relationships, made us aware we need to grow a Communications Strategy to hold a commitment to international engagement and working across cultural perspectives, epistemologies, and lifeworlds.
These questions of the commons may seem unlikely to advance in the climate of 2025, yet the time here in St Andrews has shown how learning and play together can be real medicine against despair. If the early vision of the SETI community was guided by the Drake Equation as a way to structure inquiry into the likelihood of contact, our workshop proposed a shift in emphasis: from prediction to preparation, from estimating the number of civilizations to cultivating capacities for plural, ongoing response. Across the weekend, we played with ideas of a Post-Detction equation, asking what kinds of models might help a transdisciplinary research culture stay open to the radically unfamiliar. And most importantly: what is missing?
One thing that was missing was all of you!
It was very positive to grow a relationship with the Diverse Intelligences centre at the University of St Andrews, and it feels in many ways that the workshop functioned as a kind of dress rehearsal for a future meeting that supports more of the Hub members to attend.
Listening and ensuring a space for the ethics of diverse minds is a responsibility that is heavy in the Summer of 2025, and best carried together. The conversations here were deep, sometimes difficult, and often held more questions than answers. The process is ongoing.
We close with two invitations from the community for developing these tools for Hub members, invitations that do have a very specific time limit.
We know that August is holiday time for many, however we’d greatly appreciate if you could give a few minutes of input to aid George and Kate in finalising the first edition of the Post-Detection Scenarios Toolkit for showcase at PSETI in mid-August.
We know that August is holiday time for many, however we’d greatly appreciate if you could give a few minutes of input to aid George and Kate in finalising the first edition of the Post-Detection Scenarios Toolkit for showcase at PSETI in mid-August.
We warmly welcome members to review the random sample detection situations used in this doc:
Feedback is particularly requested from those with astrobiology and physics expertise who can assess plausibility, but we warmly welcome contributions from all participants. We also encourage feedback or critique of the permutation framework itself, especially around any structural bias or limitations.
Input is invited in two ways:
Please review the selected sample detection situations to check that the main claims and detection mechanisms make sense from a scientific perspective. If any details seem dubious or misleading, please raise these now or suggest a fix. The aim is to refine each detection situation into a succinct, logically sound version that is clear to read while remaining open-ended enough for flexible use in the Toolkit (i.e. detailed but not too detailed!)
We invite you to add more examples to the sample currently listed in Part B of the Google document. This collection is imagined as a living archive of detection situations: an archive that is open to the addition of more examples across time and continuously evolves with useful detection situations as they emerge.
You’re encouraged to:
Expand the list of detection situations by adding new permutations using the Appendix key in the doc
“Translate” moments from science fiction (out-of-copyright texts please) and notable false alarms in SETI history into structured entries for the list.
The detection situations added need to match the format established across Part B. This means breaking down the case into the encoding framework with the Appendix Codex at the end of the document. For example, if creating a detection situation from Welles’ War of the Worlds, you would need to generate a permutation code as a label using the Appendix, and then write the description as tightly as possible to the established three headings: detection, interpretation and understanding. We’re aiming for succinct, structured versions that capture key narrative elements.
The situations shared will be added to the Hub wiki for ongoing collaboration and reviewed collectively. Any input is useful, and additions don’t need to be perfect. The Toolkit’s detection archive is a public, evolving effort, and anyone working with the Scenario tools is welcome to contribute. Collective input makes it much more possible to grow an archive that welcomes plural narratives, fictions, and histories that reach well beyond UK, USA and European contexts.
Final Note
One nice outcome of the July workshop is the working relationship between the Scenarios and Imagination WGs, and an agreement to explore translating moments from fiction and history into structured Toolkit entries. Clearly, not all science fictions are a good fit for a Toolkit that aims to imagine scientifically possible (though not necessarily probable) scenarios for 2050. We’ll explore more of the Workshop’s discussion on this through the August newsletter as there was a broad and deep conversation around how scenarios might be formally reviewed, as well as more open-source/citizen science possibilities for creating and reviewing them.
But, for now, there are numerous permutations of detection situations to imagine… and your input is welcome! From the office, the garden, or the beach: wherever you find yourself in August. We would really appreciate your contribution.
We would be very appreciative for this input over the next week. Reach out if you have questions.
DEADLINE: 12th August, in time for the PSETI conference at Penn State - https://www.pseti.psu.edu
Thank you