Posthuman Blues

Scientists pursue system to explain facts that slip through the cracks

"In each of these areas -- physics, biochemistry and social science -- the theories are mature and largely uncontroversial. Each discipline has its own language and its own separate machinery. Rarely is a scientist an expert in more than one area, because the worlds and languages are so different.

"This means that we can't answer complex questions that depend on more than one field." (Via The Anomalist.)

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence is a textbook victim of specialization. In the case of seeking out ETs, we've forfeited the search to a highly specified and rigidly defined group that wields the political might to tell us what is and what is not possible for reasons more political than scientific. In exchange, we're served up hypothetical alien civilizations that are little more than high-tech caricatures of our own, burdened by the same trivialities and condemned to a planet-bound existence because of the presumed expense of space travel.

The idea that we're being visited now, or have been visited in the remote past, is subject to particularly stringent scrutiny; if SETI were a nation-state and not a research effort, it would almost certainly be totalitarian, its populace communicating aberrant ideas through ill-financed samizdats and subject to humiliating public trial if discovered.

Seth Shostak is watching you.