Exo-Philosophy
“Space” and the alien are vital philosophical topics, both for their built-in imaginative edginess and because when fully confronted they can challenge us back to the Earth itself in dramatically transformed ways.
Almost no contemporary philosophers seriously engage questions of extraterrestrials or space travel generally, at least for their own sake (only for bizarre counterexamples on some other topic). Yet with multiple search programs going on and vastly expanding reams of radio, light, and other data and observations from space, today the possibility of some sort of “contact” is greater than ever. Why aren’t philosophers all over this?
Moreover, I argue that the question of “contact” reaches deeply back into our own relation to this planet, to other life forms around us that might as well be total aliens, and quite likely including communicative media we haven't yet dreamed of. There are much tighter connections to eco-philosophy than are yet recognized or followed up.
Maybe I'll write a book about this someday… or maybe events will outpace us all: maybe there will be actual “contact”, or slightly less totally enigmatic hints at it, or (astonishingly, quite predictably) home-grown aliens in the form of Artificial General or Super- Intelligence. Philosophers are beginning to look at that, But in my view far too slowly and only at the margins.
First of my publications on exo-philosophical themes was an essay prompted by a Monist CFP on Philosophical Problems of Space Exploration:
Radio astronomy as epistemology: some philosophical reflections on the contemporary search for extraterrestrial intelligence
The Monist, Vol. 71, No. 1 (January 1988), pp. 88-100.
Abstract:
This paper argues that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), particularly through radio astronomy, rests on speculative assumptions and unexamined anthropocentrism about how other intelligences would think, communicate, and value the world. It critiques the expectation that extraterrestrials would use recognizable scientific signals (like prime numbers or hydrogen frequencies), arguing that such ideas might simply be projecting human cultural, scientific, and historical biases onto radically unknown forms of life. Ultimately, I suggest that true alien intelligence may be far stranger than we can even begin to think, and that meaningful “contact” may require radically revising our concepts of intelligence, communication, and even our awareness of nonhuman intelligences right here already on Earth.
A few decades on, this article led to an invitation to Yale University podcast series “When we talk about animals”, in which among other things I offer a response to the famous Fermi Paradox (If the universe is full of other intelligences, why have we still heard nothing?): my response is that we probably just don’t know how to listen… which of course is a thought that doesn't just apply to extraterrestrials.
Listen to the podcast.
Meantime I wrote a more synoptic treatment and submitted it to Environmental Ethics, where it was declined. Nonetheless it became a sort of mother lode for future writing and thinking:
Eco-Philosophy in Space: Intimations of a Cosmic (Post-?) Environmentalism
Abstract:
Early space exploration gave us our first true picture of the Earth as a whole. We began to recognize our political and regional differences as ecologically parochial. Now, forty years later, we are engaged in deep space exploration and have even sent spacecraft beyond the limits of the solar system itself. Might we therefore be coming to see that even the “Whole Earth” isn’t the end of the story either? From a cosmic point of view, environmental philosophy may be in for some surprises. Space exploration in turn, though, may be open to re-imagination and even to new forms of participation by environmental philosophers.
A shorter but similar version appears as Chapter 9 of The Incompleat Eco-Philosopher. The final chapter of my 2012 book Mobilizing the Green Imagination (“To the Stars”) also heads spaceward on a similar launch trajectory, as does the closing chapter of Philosophy's Big Chance itself.
“Space” comes up in another way in a piece I wrote for a 2014 conference and later (2015) publication in the Canadian Journal of Environmental Education:
Working the dark edges
Canadian Journal of Environmental Education 2015, 19: 70-79.
Abstract:
Environmentalism's wider and wilder possibilities today appear as regions of seeming darkness that bracket or frame acceptable environmental thinking. One of these barely-mentionable darknesses is “outer space” – the cosmos. Another is the inner and chthonic powers of the land and natural beings generally. This essay aims to bring these two kinds of darkness briefly but provocatively into view, both in the interests of a more expansive sense of environmentalism's possibilities and to point toward some pedagogies that might edge us farther in such directions.
In the 2010s I had the enormous good fortune to be able to co-design and co-teach (three times!) an Honors course with my astronomer colleague Tony Crider, covering all of these themes as well as astronomical and astro-biological basics and a good bit of cultural history and other themes as well. Tony and I published an account of the first version of the class here:
Experiential Education on the Edge: SETI Activities for the College Classroom”, Anthony Crider and Anthony Weston
Astronomy Education Review 11 (2012).
Abstract:
In a sophomore-level, interdisciplinary honors class, we introduced students to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence through assigned readings, student presentations, classroom discussions, and multiple experiential activities. In this paper, we present four of these novel experiential activities. In the first, students suddenly find themselves trying to make contact with an unknown person who is simultaneously trying to contact them, but without either party having any clear or direct way to do so. The second is a course-long role-playing exercise patterned after the "first contact" simulations held annually at the CONTACT: Culture of the Imagination conferences. The third and fourth are parts of a unique final exam where students must respond as a group to two surreal encounters, one being a "2001"-style monolith that shows up, as in the film, entirely without warning or instructions.
One of the main readings for our course was Stephen Webb’s book Where is Everybody?, essentially a way of teaching astrobiology by framing alternative responses to the Fermi Paradox.
Most of Webb’s have to do with physical or astronomical constraints and bottlenecks, but there are cultural and philosophical answers as well. Having challenged (assigned!) our students to work up their own, Tony and I led off our survey of their answers by laying out our own (very different) solutions. Tony’s drew heavily on Nick Bostrom’s Simulation Hypothesis. Mine, as hinted above, is that the great imperative is to learn to listen far more openly and widely (and, again, that we are already deeply embedded in more-than-human communication – “aliens” are nothing new, actually).
My write-up – keyed to the class, but mostly stand-alone also, and another source for the Yale podcast.
As mentioned in the abstract of the Astronomy Education Review article, Part of our class involved non-communicating groups of students creating alien or future-human civilizations that later come into “contact”, modeled after the annual Cultures of the Imagination (COTI) project at the CONTACT conferences held annually for many years. There are detailed narratives of our three very different COTI experiences in Chapter 7 (“Adventures in Role-Playing”) of my book Teaching as the Art of Staging, cited in the Pedagogy section of this website.
Finally, I took part in one official COTI adventure myself (2012), which led among other things to an alien-world visualization in epic poem form: “Graxes Rock”.