Contact Good – Access to the Galactic Club

Contact Good – Access to the Galactic Club

(Albert is a PhD Professor of Psychology at UC Davis and Steven Served as Chief Historian at NASA When SETI Succeeds: The Impact of High-Information Contact “Contact: Long-Term Implications for Humanity” p. 18 http://ieti.org/tough/books/succeeds/sectII.pdf MLF 6-22-11)

In his seminal work Living Systems, James Grier Miller points out a trend towards increasingly larger systems (Miller, 1978). In human history we see a shift from small communities to cities and nations, and now interstate political systems. Thus, some European city-states and principalities first joined together into nations recently have become part of the European Union. This tendency to form increasingly large sociopolitical units is noted in discussions of world government (Schenkel, 1999) and of the Galactic Club (Bracewell 1975). The potential advantages of joining together include aggregated resources and peace.

Contact Good – Culture/Society

(David L., “ASTRONOMY; LISTENING TO THE STARS GETS RESPECT,” Boston Globe, p. 1, June 25, NS)

But for the most part, the scientists gathered here were not interested in such practical spinoffs from their work. "I wouldn't want to justify it on those grounds," Morrison said. The justification the SETI scientists prefer seems to be more philosophical than practical. Michael Papagiannis, BU astronomy professor, president of the IAU's SETI commission and organizer of the symposium, summed it up thus: "We stand at a historic threshold. We have the chance to open the windows of our tiny planet. We can now seek experimentally the answers to ancient and fundamental questions." Morrison adds that one of the benefits of SETI research is that it causes us to take a "broad look at our own history." Sagan says that "provided we play the game, we win whether we find extraterrestrial intelligence or not. Suppose we do a comprehensive search and find nothing. Is this a failure? I don't think so." Whether we find signals or not, he says, it will teach us valuable lessons about our place in the universe.

Contact Good – Solves Racism

(Allen, Foundation for the Future, 2000, “When SETI Succeeds: The Impact of High-Information Contact”, www.futurefoundation.org/documents/hum_pro_wrk1.pdf , p. 16, 21 July 2011) SW

Many other factors—such as our progress in spacefaring— will contribute to our consciousness of the cosmos. Second, knowledge of relationships among extraterrestrial subpopulations could help us gain insight into intergroup relations on Earth. We may learn, for example, from how ETI societies treat different societies as well as their own subpopulations. This discovery could cause us to reflect on how we ourselves treat people from different cultures and subcultures. By seeing how ETI manages diversity, we may learn new models for group relations on Earth. Almost a century of work in psychology and sociology shows that other people’s treatment of us shapes our views of ourselves. People who are treated as competent and worthwhile individuals tend to develop high self-confidence and perform well. Selfconfidence and success tend to feed upon each other and generate an upward spiral of events. People who are treated as inferior and incompetent lose self-confidence and motivation, and perform poorly. Low self-confidence and poor performance also feed on each other, in this case creating a downward spiral.
Extraterrestrial research and especially language perception opens our relationship with the other and eliminates racial binaries

Collins, Ph.D. chair and department of sociology and anthropology, 2007

(Samuel Gerald, “Le Temps Perdu: Anthropologists (Re)discover the Future,” Anthropology Quarterly,80:4, p. 1175 Fall, NS)

Christopher Roth=professor of anthropology and ethnohistory at the University of Wisconsin

E.T.s connect all sorts of anomalous agents in uncanny assemblages that promise to re-shape both the lives of people and the discourses of knowledge and science, supporting "our creative leaps into hypothesis-into the gaps of comprehension that are requisite for imagining new forms of relationality and new ways of knowing-and thus of agency and empowerment" (12). Of course, it's worth asking whether the diverse agencies interconnected in the "E.T. Effect" have equal stakes in the uncanny. Can we compare the terror of the abductee with the thrill of the anthropologist engaging in the discursive frisson? As we will see later, this will haunt this nascent E.T. Anthropology-examining E.T.s too closely opens anthropology onto (other) abductions. Christopher Roth's contribution, "Ufology as Anthropology," squarely locates the alien in the interstices of religion and science, on the one hand, and anthropology and race, on the other. That is, looking at the transformations of the alien in years following the 1947 Roswell incident, Roth finds in them familiar strains of polygenism, social Darwinism, and anti-Semitism, as well as the ghost of anthropology's last polygenist, Carleton S. Coon (whose contribution to the 1968 collection Apeman, Spaceman comes back to haunt this volume as well). The early narratives of the alien in the 1950s were recapitulations of theosophy-aliens coupling with our hominid forbears created Homo sapiens and only by finding the "purer" strain of alien blood can we hope to realize this extraterrestrial patrimony. However: the "modern" alien-those Greys proliferating through media-suggests a departure from 19th century. Starting

with the 1961 abduction narratives of the mixed-race couple, Betty and Barney Hill, the alien becomes less familiar (although Roth looks to Wells), and, shorn of much of the "master race" discourse, more inscrutable. In this, though, Roth sees the possibilities for an E.T. that undermines U.S. racial binarisms: "Like the 1960s themselves, the Hill abduction was terrifying, but with a note of optimism" (61). that is, the alien brings with it the possibility of transformation. David Samuels's perceptive essay on alien language likewise turns on the optimistic transduction of the alien and the human. Beginning with the 19th century "Martian" of Mlle Helene Smith (which turns out to be a relexification of French), Samuels suggest that the imagined, alien language (and the hope for communicating with extraterrestrials) conjures up a discourse flitting between the "alien" and the "human," in which, like Freud's uncanny, one morphs into the other. That is, "alien" tongues must be different, but must also be familiar. This is, after all, the idea behind SETI-however different alien physiognomies may prove, they must still be monitoring (and sending) radio signals at the frequency of the spectral emission of neutral hydrogen (1420 MHz). Again we see the dance between clarity and opacity, the desire to be human and alien simultaneously. The dance is similar to another, which is the dance between universality and particularism, like the internal structures of languages in the relationships between languages and minds, cultures and experiences of their speakers. The bandleaders for this dance could be called Chomskyanism and Whorfianism (124). Like the television program X-Files (and conspiracies in general) the alien begins on the peripheries of knowledge but is gradually revealed as central to power itself: this dalliance with the alien is revealed at the core of anthropological theory. How many other anthropologies have relied on the elenchus of the alien?