Strategic foresight for exploring SETI post-detection futures

The search for extraterrestrial life, including SETI, is a multi-phased process comprising pre-discovery, discovery, and post-discovery phases. The Search’s post-detection considerations can be conceptualized as contemplations of scientific and non-scientific issues pertinent partially to the discovery phase, es-
pecially after the definitively confirmed detection of a phenomenon of interest, as well as to the final post-discovery phase which will be set in motion by a definitively confirmed discovery of extraterrestrial life. To systematically explore the complex landscape of the future post-detection implications of a potential detection, scholars have proposed using scenarios. However, this traditional approach has actually focused single-sidedly on generating specific detection situations, while neglecting the broader future contextual environment that will necessarily encompass a detection as it unfolds. The world, however, is constantly changing through conditions of radical uncertainty, owing to the interconnectedness of its ecological, technological, scientific, economic, social, cultural, political, legal, and other domains that involve a multitude of diverse feedback loops. Therefore, the overall backdrop of a potential detection can significantly differ from today’s world: it won’t merely be its straightforward extrapolation.

Unfortunately, classical techniques for engaging with the future, such as forecasting, are unable to handle the varying outcomes that could play out over long time horizons (decades ahead). For this reason, the SETI Post-Detection Hub has leveraged methods and techniques from the field of Strategic Foresight,
a sub-domain of Futures Studies, which can help systematically model and explore multiple alternative long-term futures by means of thought-provoking scenarios and offer actionable insights towards preparation and planning in light of them. Over its previous working period, the Hub’s multidisciplinary group of experts recognized three elements as necessary for building SETI post-detection scenarios: (a) a set of global-scale, contrasting, contextual pre-detection future scenarios of the world as backdrops, with a long-term time horizon (2050); (b) a way to methodically and comprehensively generate various kinds of logically-consistent, random, unfamiliar detection situations that could take place in any of these future backdrops; and (c) various communities of interest that can interpret and synthesize the previous two elements into “vernacular” post-detection future scenarios, tailored for their specific domains, cultures, or regions. After a multi-stage strategic foresight process, the Hub has finalized the necessary foundational material to be further used by communities of interest. We expect that the broad utilization of this material will help highlight blind spots and stress-test strategies and policies against the inherent
unexpectedness that SETI entails.