SETI Has Been Taken Over By Woke Ideologues More Interested in Debating Transphobia and Whiteness Than Searching the Stars

Last time around, we considered NASA’s recent attempts to build outer space communications systems, and the strange belief of contemporary Left-leaning scientists and academics affiliated with astronomical organisations like SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) that any aliens we did manage one day to contact would inevitably talk in a language every bit as impeccably woke as they themselves do.

A classic illustration of such delusion came in the newly ideologically-captured journal Scientific American in 2022. Under the headline ‘Cultural Bias Distorts the Search for Alien Life’ appeared an interview with Rebecca Charbonneau, a young SETI-linked cultural historian whose paper ‘Imaginative Cosmos: The Impact of Colonial Heritage in Radio Astronomy and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence’ had brought her to the attention of the editors.

According to Charbonneau, within sci-fi shows like Star Trek, space being “the final frontier” demonstrated how space exploration itself was filled with innate colonialist assumptions, with “first contact with aliens [acting] as a stand-in for [Western] first contact with Indigenous peoples”. 

Weren’t these ideas just fictional literary metaphors upon behalf of the scriptwriters, though? No, because according to the doctrine of Critical Theory that contemporary young pseuds like Rebecca all slavishly subscribe to, words create reality: “Words and socially constructed things are real because we are a verbal, social species. Things that are socially created still have a real-world impact; they’re not imaginary.”

Two particularly damaging social constructs are the words “intelligence” and “civilisation”, these being mere fictional Western concepts which were “tightly bound with the histories of racism, genocide and colonialism”. When Westerners made contact with metaphorically ‘alien’ beings like Australian Aborigines in the past, they just enslaved or wiped them out, Charbonneau argued. “Intelligence”, she warned, is “certainly a dangerous word”, hence her principled complete lack of any such quality herself. 

Un-Scientific American

Rebecca was deeply worried. What if SETI found some E.T.s who didn’t seem terribly civilised or intelligent to us, and just treated them like the British once had the Aborigines? Yet the traditional accepted mission of SETI was indisputably to search for alien intelligence, or alien civilisations. This very idea was dangerous and laden with “intellectual colonial baggage” too, so could easily be “weaponised” by genocidal astronauts, feared the oversensitive academic: she seems to have confused NASA with NSDAP. 

For Charbonneau, it was disappointing that so many of her fellow exobiologists “start their research from a technical search perspective” rather than by asking random Andaman Islanders what they think about all this. Some more traditional SETI scientists objected to her criticism, pointing out that the only off-planet lifeforms humans are likely to discover locally are bacteria and “you can’t offend a germ” by talk of ‘colonising’ Mars – a protestation she dismisses by saying that particular harmful word “might not hurt an alien, but using [it] will hurt people on Earth”. She even appears to disapprove of an old NASA space-shuttle being called Columbus; doesn’t Mission Control know he was an evil genocidal white maniac?

Henceforth, the whole point of SETI should be completely reformed, from listening to unknown groups on Mars, to listening to marginalised groups here on Earth instead: “SETI is designed to listen outward, but… it’s not always so great at listening inward.” It would be hard to imagine a statement better illustrating the levels of self-indulgent solipsism that have now successfully been imposed upon hitherto politically neutral sciences like astronomy. Where would Rebecca like SETI scientists to begin pointing their space-antennae instead, exactly? Up their own arseholes, like where she lives?  

Game, SETI and Match?

According to science writer Lawrence M. Krauss, Dr. Charbonneau’s ilk now dominate SETI every bit as much as Daleks now dominate the Planet Skaro. He points out that she is a Jansky Fellow at the U.S. National Radio Astronomy Observatory, a fellowship supposed to fund “the most promising researchers in radio astronomy”, not woke witch-hunting ideologues. Recent SETI conferences, Krauss observes, have been dominated not by actual science, but endless debates about transphobia, homosexuality and whiteness. 

Krauss has been told many proper SETI scientists despair that it is consequently growing “harder and harder to actually carry out [meaningful] SETI research”, and they fear being pushed out due to being politically incorrect. What’s more, Charbonneau seems to have got her wish, with the very word “intelligence” now allegedly banned by SETI, as it is “a white construct”. Here’s an angry Richard Dawkins, tweeting about it:

Why hasn’t it changed its name to SET, then? 

Safe-Space Invaders

The American Association for Science (AAAS – soon to be renamed ASSS, ‘Astrophysicists Subverting Science Systematically’) has also been captured. During a March 2023 conference concerning “the ethics of space exploration”, a Dr. Pamela Copeland stated that future Western astronauts should endeavour to become “gentle explorers” as, thanks to our worthless colonial history, the very word “exploration” was now “almost synonymous with exploitation”. 

Another conference attendee, Dr. Hilding Neilson, a Mi’kmaq Indian scientist, said that, before landing on the moon, white astro-Nazis should first consult indigenous Canadian Indians, as the moon played an important role in native folklore, and Indians possessed “other ways of knowing” about it than purely scientific ones. Already, light pollution from streetlamps originally facilitated by the Industrial Revolution of the West had blotted out the night stars which played such a crucial role in many native mythologies, something some academics claim is a form of “cultural genocide” – see this academic abstract:

Whitening the Sky: light pollution as a form of cultural genocide

Duane W. Hamacher, Krystal de Napoli, Bon Mott

Light pollution is actively destroying our ability to see the stars. Many indigenous traditions and knowledge systems around the world are based on the stars, and the peoples’ ability to observe and interpret stellar positions and properties is of critical importance for daily life and cultural continuity. The erasure of the night sky acts to erase indigenous connection to the stars, acting as a form of ongoing cultural and ecological genocide. Efforts to reduce, minimise or eliminate light pollution are being achieved with varying degrees of success, but urban expansion, poor lighting design,and the increased use of blue-light emitting LEDs as a cost-effective solution is worsening problems related to human health, wildlife,and astronomical heritage for the benefit of capitalistic economic growth. We provide a brief overview of the issue, illustrating some of the important connections that the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people of Australia maintain with the stars, as well as the impact growing light pollution has on this ancient knowledge. We propose a transdisciplinary approach to solving these issues, using a foundation based on indigenous philosophies and decolonising methodologies.

Was man landing on the moon not just yet another manifestation of this same unthinkingly destructive mindset? Dr. Neilson furthermore explained that various tracts of so-called “treaty land” in North America truly belonged to his indigenous kin thanks to legal agreements signed with the Canadian Government. Such property-deeds may have delineated their land’s limits in length and breadth, but had been carelessly drafted with the “absence of a height limit”, meaning the Mi’kmaq actually owned everything directly above their treaty lands, including outer space and the moon, at least imaginatively speaking. Therefore, if NASA or anyone else Western and colonialist ever decided to go up there and start rocket-raping it, this would be technically illegal.

Today, the West’s chief geopolitical rivals in China and Russia are making serious plans to begin mining vast areas of the moon in search of rare minerals to help them achieve global domination down here on terra firma. Meanwhile, NASA and the European Space Agency appear much more concerned with self-righteously landing the first woman on the moon, sending disabled people spinning out of their wheelchairs into orbit and celebrating lesbian astronauts on stamps (Jeremy Corbyn once wanted to put this last highly pressing issue on the U.K. National Curriculum). Which side do you think most likely to end up dominating tomorrow’s globe?

Blank Space

To be fair to the likes of Rebecca Charbonneau, I do agree with them on one thing; in her interview, the SETI-woman called outer space “a mirror” which reflects human observers’ pre-existing beliefs straight back down at them. 

I once wrote a book called Space Oddities which makes this very same argument; a large portion of it was about communist humans who expected one day to meet communist aliens. Later, I wrote another book, The Saucer and the Swastika, about white supremacist Nazi humans who expected one day to meet white supremacist Nazi aliens. Now, my latest book, Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science, features a section about contemporary black supremacist humans who likewise expect one day to meet black supremacist aliens. And so it goes, as I believe they say on Tralfamadore. 

So, I do think Ms. Charbonneau and her woke crowd are sort of correct in one specific limited aspect of what they are saying: namely, that ideologically biased humans often treat outer space as a blank canvas upon which to project their own personal political neuroses. The only question I would ask is: why on Earth do they think this exact same principle doesn’t also apply to them?

Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books, the latest being Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets (Pen & Sword/Frontline), which is out now.