Rehearsing Post-Detection Futures: Building Futures Literacy vis-à-vis Post-Detection Considerations for a Responsible Search for Extraterrestrial Life

Abstract The search for extraterrestrial life, sapient or not, is a multi-phased process comprising pre-discovery, discovery, and post-discovery phases. Post-detection considerations can be conceptualized as contemplations of scientific and non-scientific issues pertinent partially to the discovery phase and to the final post-discovery phase that will be set in motion by a confirmed discovery of extraterrestrial life. To systematically explore the corresponding complex future landscape, scholars have proposed using alternative scenarios. However, this historical approach has actually focused more narrowly on generating specific detection situations, while neglecting the broader contextual environment scenarios that will necessarily encompass the detection. By drawing on Futures Studies, this work argues that a more comprehensive anticipatory approach is needed, involving the parallel delineation of both possible detection situations and possible future contextual scenarios, followed by their integration. Additionally, this work introduces a “Rehearsing Post-Detection Futures” workshop workflow inspired by the “Futures Literacy Laboratory” approach. This ready-to-deploy, interactive, participatory workshop is intended for educators and aims to help students and scholars in relevant disciplines broaden and diversify not only what but also how and why they anticipate when they consider the effects of a detection of extraterrestrial life in the future, particularly during the most urgent and precarious post-detection stage, i.e., the short-term stage right after the detection and its communication, thereby facilitating the cultivation of the participants’ futures literacy. Such interventions can support the mindful deployment of a critical-hermeneutic anticipatory perspective towards building a more responsible search for extraterrestrial life, sapient or not.