Andjelka B. Kovačević

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.

Emily Finer, Kate Genevieve, George Profitiliotis

St Andrews is an ecologically rich and creative town by the sea, in Summer it is full of music and students celebrating. We were fortunate to spend our days in Scotland punctuated by fresh walks along the shore, and to meet many of the characters of these stories in moments of more-than-human encounter: coaxing an imperious heron from a car bonnet or being joined in the closing session by two stern and vocal sea birds. Animals and stars fill the old stories of Scotland: seals and red deer, seabirds and Highland cows, creatures who share the land and sea and give the local myths their personality and feel, so key to cultural and planetary ways of knowing.

Informally we started exploring knowledge of the stars in the stories and music of Scotland in our time in St Andrews. One aim of the WG is to support efforts to grow a shared anthology of imagined accounts of contact and how fictional societies respond to the discovery of life, across science fiction, film, games, art and live scenario practices. This anthology work grows a focus  on space imaginaries that have grown up in various regions, focusing particularly on imaginaries from beyond the American and European literary canons, such as Ukraine and Soviet literature.

One of the founding tenets of the Post-Detection Hub is that imagination is vital to scientific research, particularly towards in the design of methods to research the unknown. The Imagination workshop was a celebration of George’s long-standing stewardship of the Scenarios Working Group and an invitation to remix the material that has been growing as the Post-Detection Imaginations Toolkit. The workshop was an opportunity to work on the Toolkit collectively: to stress-test ideas, share methods and make progress with 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. This scenario work functions by cultivating an ecology of speculations, not a single best guess or prediction. To meet this aim the toolkit is designed as a living archive: open-ended and welcoming of ongoing input, feedback, critique and reworking. A participatory section is held by the wiki and styled as a kind of citizen-science experiment enriched by the creativity of many, open to gather scientifically possible, even if not probable, futures for 2050.

One nice outcome of the July workshop is the working relationship between the Scenarios and Imagination WGs, and fresh ideas on how we could meet the challenge of including cultural context in relation to the toolkit.

Can we explore translating moments from fiction and historical SETI “false alarms” into structured Toolkit entries?  The Toolkit is agnostic and can accommodate write ups of scenarios as diverse as Jocelyn Bell Burnell’s discovery of pulsars, to Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds or Kate Bush’s Experiment IV. This kind of wild diversity may make it possible to build a living archive that welcomes stories, fictions and histories with multiple contexts. Offering this public creative participation can really broaden the imaginative scope of the Toolkit’s archive as a shared research resource.

The scenario work depends on curiosity and the afternoon of the workshop was dedicated to play. 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. Learning through improvisation, whether play testing the Live Action Roleplay (LARP) outdoors, or through digital interaction with Andrew O'Malley's AI tool that games pre-detection scenarios, offered distinct ways of engaging with uncertainty. The conversation between these two approaches was lively and provoked fresh ideas on working with the complexity of relational dynamics in live interaction, and working with computation to power complex and immediate organisation of diverse speculative scenarios.

The true value of this imaginative work lies not only in its outputs but in all the relational knowledge and mutual learning in the making and doing. It was a joy to celebrate two and a half years of running the Hub together, and to be reminded of how deeply generosity has shaped the work. The time in Scotland was characterised by attentive listening, sharing expertise and a dedication to care throughout.

These imaginative processes are worth sharing, and we look forward to hosting a workshop session for with the PSETI August conference, a key meeting for the community, which will offer the next phase of developing these speculative tools.

 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.

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?

It was very positive to grow a relationship with the Diverse Intelligences centre at the University of St Andrews, and our hope is that the workshop will become an annual Summer fixture and that it functioned as a kind of dress rehearsal for future meetings that can actively support more of the Hub's members to attend.

Listening and ensuring a space for the ethics of diverse minds and diverse life is a responsibility that is heavy in the Summer of 2025 and a task best held together. The sessions and conversations in Scotland were deep, sometimes difficult, and often pointed to 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 have a specific time limit (see below).