Future imagining as a social practice: SETI, aliens, and other others
David Valentine, University of Minnesota
From an anthropological perspective, imagining the future can be understood as a social practice like any other. Social practices open up possibilities but also constrain others, and this paper will argue that imagining the future is a social practice which already constrains the possibilities for what the future will be. In particular, I examine the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) in the U.S., a scientific search for artificial signals in the radio spectrum which would give evidence of intelligent life beyond Earth. One of the primary proponents of SETI, Seth Shostak, has argued that such signals will be detected within a generation, and there is massive popular interest in SETI, as evidenced by the wide distribution of the SETI@home program, a computer program which runs on millions of personal computers to process massive amounts of SETI data.
In my initial research, I have focused on the imaginings of SETI scientists and supporters of the possibilities that would emerge upon contact with an intelligent alien species, and how communication with such species would take place. What is striking about SETI is its imaginative modeling and self-reflection about the nature of language, communication, and linguistic difference, and its catholic approach to what communication can mean and how it could be facilitated.
This conversation is taking place, however, at a time when other kinds of aliens – in particular, immigrants to the United States, who are legally labeled as "aliens" – are facing ever-strengthening restrictions on their rights and their abilities to express themselves. In particular, the powerful "English Only" movement, manifested in such organizations as U.S. English Inc., insists that the unity of the U.S. State should be secured by legislating English as the nation's official language. While there have been failed attempts for over two decades to pass such federal legislation, The National Language Act of 2006, introduced into the U.S. Senate this past August, stands a strong chance of passage in the coming year.
Between these two future imaginings – a unified, English-speaking nation where immigrant aliens are expected to lose their cultural and linguistic difference, and the facilitation of radically different forms of communication with ET aliens – lies a tension over different imaginings of an American future. I argue that these different imaginings index a much longer history of ambivalence over immigration and cultural and linguistic difference within the U.S., and I raise questions as to how the working out of this tension in contemporary American life is already shaping the nation's – and the world's – future.