SETI: Signs in space/ Enacting space

[From the SETI project, "A Sign in Space" (https://asignin.space/)] 

“To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world — in order to set up a shadow world of ‘meanings,’ Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation 

In May, the SETI Institute Artist-in-Residence initiated a piece of collaborative performance–the decoding of an “alien” message, transmitted from the European Space Agency's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO). “A Sign in Space” is a simulation that enlists ordinary people in the work of “decoding” an alien message–one that you can download yourself. Along the way, SETI has hosted a series of workshops (including one from anthropologist Willi Lempert) designed to help participants through the decoding process–including hints on avoiding ethnocentric (and anthropocentric) assumptions about what this communication could be and what the intentions of extraterrestrial intelligence might entail. 

I am a very enthusiastic SETI advocate, but I wonder if “decoding” is really the best we can do here. I’m not entirely alone–the very lively Discord discussion around this project has included many, philosophical tangents that have questioned what exactly “interpretation” might mean in this context. On the one hand, semiotics (in that broader, Peircean sense) is something that all of us living creatures do. As Kohn writes, “All living beings sign. We humans are therefore at home with the multitude of semiotic life” (Kohn 2013: 42). All life as we know it is in communication with its environment–many of us living creatures along multiple semiotic levels. So it is certainly reasonable to assume that other life will also be involved in sign-making. 

But what about “decoding”? “Decoding” has a distinctly different valence than sign-making. It conjures up secrets: military maneuvers, economic competition, Incan quipu, Julius Caesar’s cipher, Alan Turing toiling over the Enigma Machine. The age of the internet is also the age of cryptography–the logical extrapolation of a digital capitalism. And decoding is also a kind of violence: decoding the secrets of nature, of the universe, of life itself. Something that will not yield its meaning readily, that will only succumb to force and intellect. 

More broadly, current approaches to coding/ decoding owe their existence to insights in and around the Josiah Macy Conferences on Cybernetics, a series of meeting held from the 1940s into the 1950s, and to which we owe much of our current understanding of information, neural networks and even natural language processing. The dream of the conferences was to provide a “lingua franca of science” where “not only scientific problems but even questions of art and human freedom could be treated in computational terms” (Geoghegan 2023: 23). 

In that, the Macy Conferences seems to have succeeded, and our whole world seems reducible to flows of code. Yet there were other possibilities raised in those landmark meetings on cybernetics, and reduction of the world to code is only one, at the expense of the alternatives. One example: the second-generation cyberneticist Gordon Pask built an installation called the “Colloquy of Mobiles” involving five robots (two “male” and three “female”) rotating towards each other on the bases of lights and sounds. What marks this off from other cybernetic machines, though, is its performative dimension. Pask meant for humans to interact with the Colloquy. As he wrote, “the mobiles produce a complex auditory and visual effect by dint of their interactions. They cannot, of course, interpret these sound and light patterns. But human beings can and it seems reasonable to suppose that they will also aim to achieve patterns which they deem pleasing by interacting with the system at a higher level of discourse” (Pask 1971, quoted in Pickering 2010: 359-360). Not “communicating” with the machines in the sense of a shared message but interacting with the Colloquy in order to produce light and sounds that they enjoy. 

 This version of cybernetics offered up a Situationist vision, where non-representational play would result in the emergence of new behaviors conjoining people with machines in cybernetic assemblages. In Pask’s models, performance would bring together all these agents in the space of cooperative assemblage, without the reduction of one or the other to codes. As Pickering explains (2010” 31-32), “The entire task of cybernetics was to figure out how to get along in a world that was not enframable, that could not be subjugated to human designs–how to build machines and construct systems that could adapt performatively to whatever happened to come their way.” 

On the one hand, it’s clear that “code” still has primacy: our lives are explicable to coding/decoding in more ways than ever before–from our biology (through genetics) to our social lives (through network analysis) and our physical well-being (through quantified self technologies). On the other hand, we are surrounded by a number of variously lively, nonhuman agents with which we interact without actually decoding. In fact, we have little sense of how algorithms that increasingly interpenetrate our lives even operate. Hidden behind proprietary training data, we cannot be sure why our job application was rejected, or why one YouTube video was recommended over another. Yet we performatively interact every day. 

In Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life,” heptapods hover over the Earth engaging humans in conversation. What is their message? There is, really, none. They come with neither threat nor scientific salvation. They only bring their language, which, in the spirit of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, alters Louisa Banks’s sense of time and causality. “For the heptapods, all language is performative. Instead of using language to inform, they used language to actualize” (Chiang 2002: 138). The meetings with Banks–that was the message, and Banks “cracks” the code of language, but not the message of the visit. 

This, undoubtedly, is the point of SETI’s message as well. The “decoding” here is less important than the performance of decoding–the enlistment of global experts and ordinary people working together in (relatively) non-hierarchical ways. 

 Perhaps in the future we will discover a signal or an artifact. Will the point be to interpret meaning and intention? Or something else? Like the “Colloquy of Mobiles,” we humans might interact with the artifact and with each other without “breaking” the code of alien intelligence—which could have been the point all along. 

References 

Chiang, Ted (2002). “Story of Your Life.” In Stories of Your Life and Others. NY: Tor Books. 

Geoghegan, Bernard Dionysius (2023). Code. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 

Kohn, Eduardo (2013). How Forests Think. Berkeley: University of California Press. 

Pickering, Andrew (2010). The Cybernetic Brain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Remembrance of SETI’s Past

(I participated in a workshop organized by two anthropologists studying SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence): Claire Webb and Michael Oman-Reagan.  The topic called for us to think broadly about the future in relation to SETI.  My own contribution revolves around the SETI/METI divide and the question of time.)

As Pioneer crafts hurtle off into interstellar space with their plaques celebrating Eurocentric, heteronormative humanity atop a school-child’s depiction of the solar system, people have inevitably thought of better things they could have sent to the stars.  These have been the subject of numerous discussions and Kickstarter campaigns.  But all of these concerns and alternative plans reflect on one of the chief obstacles to communication with ETI—coevalness.  SETI doesn’t take place in coeval timespace; even signals to (or from) nearby systems (e.g., Proxima Centauri) take a few light years to reach there.  Their past is our present; our past is their present.  Whether we are listening for “their” signal, communicating “ours” or some combination, we do so through a time machine that denies the coevalness of the encounter.  SF writers have utilized a variety of devices to surmount these temporal obstacles, e.g., Le Guin’s ansible (first appearing in her 1966 Rocannon’s World), but the problem of communication (rather than just signal detection) remains.  More recently, SF fiction and film have gravitated back to the question of coevalness, notably in the 2016 film Arrival (based on Ted Chiang’s 1998 “Story of Your Life”) and the 2014 film Interstellar.  And even though these mark a departure from the ansible-like plot devices, they ultimately revolve around questions of coevalness. In Arrival, Louise Banks learns an alien language that is premised on strikingly different temporalities—past, present and future circle back on one another in a non-linear way.  And with her language acquisition, Banks becomes aware of the future (remembered as her past), in such a way that allows her to intervene in the present.  With Interstellar, it’s the protagonist, Cooper, who falls into a tesseract which allows him to manipulate the past in order to allow his daughter to develop the technologies that will liberate humanity from a dying Earth.  Strictly speaking, the alien is ancillary to both of these films.  In Arrival, we see aliens through a translucent screen and, in Interstellar, Cooper’s daughter misrecognizes the dust patterns as a ghostly, alien-like communication.  Really, it’s the humans that matter.  In Arrival, the plot hinges on very human problems of war, aggression and cooperation—with the aliens remaining enigmatic and part of the film’s mise en scène rather than active agents.  In Interstellar, of course, the dust patterns and the watch-face manipulations come from Cooper himself.  However: the importance of these films is not their novel approach to communication with ETI; it is, simply, the importance of communicating with ourselves across temporalities.  In other words, finding a coeval timespace to communicate with the alien is a symptom of our own problems communicating between human futures and human pasts and, in the process, coming to terms with a present in which both the past is interpolated into the future, and the future in the past. 

With Pioneer and Voyager, our future contact is premised on our past assumptions about science, philosophy, aesthetics and political economy.  They are—strictly speaking—communications with our past that lie in our future, with an “us” that is already alien(ated) to us.  Is this inevitable?  Or is it (pace Arrival) an artifact of Western temporalities that position past, present and future along a line like the solar system in the Pioneer plaques?  How can we think about that in a way that doesn’t reproduce “the future” as superannuated past?

Why would this matter?  Here, the Other we encounter is our past--the assumptions we make about ourselves and the assumptions we make about extraterrestrial intelligence.  Even if we concede that others whose signals we might detect labor under the same time machine conditions that we do, there is no certainty that the face the same problem of coevalness.  Ours is a product of Western ethnocentrism, modernity and, perhaps, the duration of the human.  But even Earthly species experience markedly different temporalities than the scientists who search signals from other places and other times.  It seems likely that the problem of coeval timescapes doesn’t look the same elsewhere.  

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Searching for the Anthropological Alien

An eminently sensible article in today's New York Times from Seth Shostak, the Director of SETI and a tireless advocate for our continuing quest to find intelligent life beyond the Earth.  But not just that: he's also been a leader in the continuing discourse of what each of the terms in the acronym "SETI" should mean: what kind of search?  Where?  And what should constitute "intelligence"?  This time, he's weighing in on a debate over actively courting extraterrestrial neighbors by broadcasting transmissions into space.  What should we say?  And shouldn't we be more careful?  Perhaps extraterrestrial intelligence will be less-than-impressed with the ravages that modernity and capitalism have wrought.  Or perhaps they'll see our various weaknesses, and swoop down to attack!  These arguments, Shostak suggests, have more to tell us about contemporary, Hollywood scripts than about the intentions of aliens, and he counters with another, suitably contemporary, proposal: send the aliens Big Data!

But this Big Data approach to SETI (Big Data SETI?) seems just as implicated in our vision of human futures as any Hollywood evocation of alien invasion.  "Big Data" seem poised to solve all of our problems, and it was just a matter of time before the idea came up in the context of extraterrestrial life.  And this is ok.  Unavoidably, SETI is about communicating with humans--today.  Each SETI proposal, each new Arecibo project, is potentially data about extraterrestrial intelligence, but also data about terrestrial intelligence.  As Kant writes (and as David Clark expertly annotates),

"The highest concept of species may be that of a terrestrial rational being [eines irdischen vernünftigen], but we will not be able to describe its characteristics because we do not know of a nonterrestrial rational being [nicht- irdischen Wesen] which would enable us to refer to its properties and consequently classify that terrestrial being as rational. It seems, therefore, that the problem of giving an account of the character of the human species is quite insoluble [sie schlechterdings unauflöslich], because the problem could only be solved by comparing two species of rational beings on the basis of experience, but experience has not offered us a comparison between two species of rational beings."  

To put it another way--we have already given Kant his aliens, and each SETI experiment is simultaneously an encounter with an extraterrestrial rationality with which to measure ourselves.  As we move from SETI@home to what will undoubtedly be fascinating experiments with Big Data, we uncover more and more of our own assumptions about intelligence and communication, and our own concern about the intentions of the humans and nonhumans around us.  In this case, "we" (keeping in mind this is hardly a universal "we") worry about the messages we're sending, the networks we're forming.  The albatross of Big Data around around our necks continues to compel us (like the Ancient Mariner) to tell the governments and institutions around us everything about ourselves, all of the time.  Do we really want aliens mining our Big Data?  Do we really want the terrestrial, non-human agents around us to mine our Big Data (search engines, social network analysis, etc.)?