The storytelling brain and connecting public audiences with SETI

Abstract The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is, at its core, a grand endeavour in communication. While we hope to detect signals from intelligent civilisations beyond our solar system, searching for cosmic company has profound implications for our species’ curiosity, technological capabilities, and innate need to connect socially. It gives pause for thought that while we focus the search and post-detection, we undervalue what evolutionary psychologists assert, neuroscientists have demonstrated, science communicators know works in connecting science with society, and journalists employ: We are hardwired for storytelling by evolution, remaining our most effective form of communication. What if the most important message is not from the stars but what the search tells about wanting to know what is in the last chapter of one of the most profound stories ever told? Should the experiment succeed, the stories of survival of intelligence from a distant civilisation may be of most interest.