Critique of Alien Reason: Toward a Critical Interplanetary Humanities

Abstract

This essay argues for a more methodologically diverse search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) and study of habitable exoplanets that might contribute to the emergent field of critical habitability studies across the sciences and humanities. Whether or not contact is made with extraterrestrials, this effort is implicated in changing concepts of otherness at home and the ongoing work to decolonize Earth and make it more inhabitable. I examine historical efforts to think aliens philosophically in the work of Kant, to conclude with a reflection on the trope of contact between humans, nonhuman animals, and aliens in Ted Chiang’s short story “The Great Silence.”

The thought of life on other planets has tended to flare up suddenly at key moments in human history—precisely, in times of intense philosophical and humanistic preoccupation with problems of habitability of Earth. One such key historical moment is certainly underway right now. Our present moment is the first to discover what French Enlightenment polymath Bernard de Fontanelle hypothesized as the “plurality of worlds” to be a reality. In the past decade, astronomers have detected 23 Earth-like planets deemed to be potentially habitable (and 37 other planets that may be habitable¹). A planet is defined as potentially habitable if it is rocky and at a distance from its star that permits liquid water to form on the planet’s surface. Extrapolating from recent observations and data of exoplanets, astronomers estimate there may be up to 300 million habitable planets in the Milky Way alone.² The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) dwelling on these exoplanets now plays a central role in astronomical science. Whether or not SETI is successful in the near term, the humanities and philosophical thought must prepare for the transformative effect contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) would have on core theoretical concepts including life, otherness, intelligence, and universality. The reverse relation is also—and equally importantly—the case: these same core philosophical concepts already have formative effects on SETI research. The science of the search as well as the cultural and civilizational questions embedded in any possible contact event are connected fundamentally to established philosophical positions towards cosmology, alterity, and co-existence. My argument begins with assessing the conceptual implications of the recursive logic by which, as SETI transforms the humanities, the humanities also transforms SETI.

The search for extraterrestrial habitable and inhabited worlds is premised on our own evidence for habitability on Earth. The range of habitable space on Earth keeps being expanded as life is discovered to subsist in extremely cold and hot environs, in locations deep beneath the earth lacking all sunlight, and in highly acidic conditions. Corresponding to this recognition of the diversity of life on Earth is the advancing consciousness that we require a contemporary—and more-than-human—political model for how to share the planet as a whole. Kant, within a humanist framework, already envisioned a shared cosmopolitan horizon in his essay “Perpetual Peace,” where he states that the “right to the earth’s surface” (106) must be held in common. Kant adds: “Since the earth is a globe, [people] cannot disperse over an infinite area, but must necessarily tolerate one another’s company. And no-one originally has any greater right than any one else to occupy any particular portion of the earth” (106). Hannah Arendt adapted this declaration of the right to share the earth after the disaster of World War II. Arendt insisted that sharing the earth is not a formal right but the precondition for having a political realm in the first place. The reality of plurality precedes any particular political organization. Plurality is constituted by the givenness of multiple forms and ways of inhabiting the planet, the pre-existing condition into which all life enters upon birth. This plurality is manifest “in sheer human togetherness” (180) and in this togetherness “the reality of the world is guaranteed by the presence of others, by its appearing to all” (199). Arendt theorized plurality as limited to humans, but it is possible to expand the case for plurality to the entire company of what Bruno Latour calls “terrestrials.” Latour, for his part, insists that a politics of sharing the earth must involve “engendering terrestrials – not just humans, but all terrestrials. It is based on the idea of cultivating attachments, operations that are all the more difficult because animate beings are not limited by frontiers and are constantly overlapping, embedding themselves within one another” (83). Instead of conceptualizing the sharing of the Earth as a future horizon or a supplementary addition to politics, Latour and others working in the field of environmental humanities make clear that sharing the habitable planet already constitutes an ongoing political ontology of entanglement and interdependency.

Yet, there is a painful irony at this historical moment in that as scientists identify a wider range of habitable spaces on Earth and begin to accumulate observable evidence of habitable planets orbiting nearby stars, the Earth itself is becoming increasingly unshared and diminished in its biodiverse inhabitants. While our conception of the habitable universe is expanding, conditions of habitability on Earth are increasingly becoming constrained and undone. Life on Earth is facing a sixth mass extinction event in which population sizes of biodiverse species are dwindling precipitously and the rates of extinction are rising. Anthropogenic global warming and habitat destruction, resulting from resource and labor extractivism feeding capitalist and colonialist pursuits, now play primary roles in deciding who gets to inhabit the Earth. And as the novel coronavirus pandemic and the ongoing racist violence spurring historic protests have made all too evident, we as humans are far from sharing the planet in socially and environmentally just ways among ourselves. The ironic failure to connect SETI and the search for inhabited exoplanets to habitability crises on Earth—as is dramatized in Ted Chiang’s short story “The Great Silence” that I discuss at the conclusion of this essay—means that SETI research is at risk of continuing to repeat the failure to share the biodiverse Earth. I interpret how Chiang’s story doubles environmental humanities and SETI perspectives via the contact trope while also offering a reflection on how SETI research may continue to repeat the failure to share the biodiverse Earth.

Planetary scientist David Grinspoon reckons in all seriousness that if we ever make contact with an alien civilization, it will be one that has passed through the same kind of “bottleneck” that we are experiencing on Earth whereby the technologies and behaviors that have allowed civilization to flourish are also undermining the habitability of the Earth: “If we find other civilizations, it will be the ones who have made it through the bottleneck of technological adolescence” (275).³ Grinspoon suggests that we should ask the aliens for advice out of this bottleneck. But the planetary crisis we face surely is more than just a question of technological maturity. At this rate, if we ever get the chance, we will also need to ask the aliens how they got through their pandemics and racism and social divisions spurred by the erosion of the difference between truth and lies.

At the same time as exoplanetary knowledge advances, it is also the research of SETI that must be changed by the environmental and social justice work on Earth. The long history of treating Black and Indigenous bodies as Other and alien is encoded in historical conceptualizations of extraterrestrial otherness. The most rigorous scientific work of SETI has consistently drawn from philosophical and science-fiction figurations of alterity and contact, and as Zakkiyah Iman Jackson remarks, “science fiction’s genre strictures are shaped by racialized, gendered, and sexual histories of conquest, slavery, and colonialism” (123). For SETI to be successful for all parties involved, at the very least it must not be a deflection from the Earth’s problems and must incorporate an antiracist and decolonizing practice towards otherness. Indeed, the extensive archive of Indigenous science fiction writings already shows, in the phrasing of Grace L. Dillon, how to “wed sf theory and Native intellectualism, Indigenous scientific literacy, and western techno-cultural science, scientific possibilities enmeshed with Skin thinking” (2). Kodwo Eshun points to how writers associated with Afrofuturism “use extraterrestriality as a hyperbolic trope to explore the historical terms, the everyday implications of forcibly imposed dislocation, and the constitution of Black Atlantic subjectivities” (298–99). The diverse and distressed cultures of contact on Earth already have changed “our” sense of what it means to inhabit the Earth, a knowledge that should fundamentally inform thought of exoplanetary habitability.

The meaningfulness of SETI, in other words, does not depend alone on whether or not there is actual contact with ETIs. What SETI most compellingly offers is a place for public reflection on and enaction of a commitment to planetary sharing and cosmological commons. SETI as a “public culture” would include recognizing the ongoing depletion of biodiverse life on Earth and the history of the destruction of peoples and cultures deemed other. Current research in SETI, while sensitized with the times to the histories of violence associated with colonialist contact, does not nearly go far enough in addressing its own responsibilities. David Grinspoon’s compelling work is an example of this lacuna; his book offers an extensive reflection on the Anthropocene as now a central theme for SETI but has nothing to say about environmental justice in connection with social and racial dispossessions as a crucial framework for conceptualizing interstellar contact. A correlated, more concrete example of an instance where SETI’s responsibility can be raised is in the plans to erect another massive telescope on Mauna Kea without the consent of Native Hawaiians.⁴ SETI must then build into its methods and material practices a reflection on how the history of contact and conceptualizations of otherness have so often proceeded along the lines of the oppression and dispossession of marginalized and racialized lives. The work of SETI, given its longstanding indebtedness to science fiction and broader humanities conceptualizations of contact and otherness, thus requires comprehension of the large counter-history of writing concerning contact and its aftermath from the perspective of the victims of contact. The historical and contemporary practices of anti-racism and decolonization as generative of a non-oppressive legacy and lineage of contact thus need to be incorporated at a disciplinary level in SETI.

Indeed, there are already examples in the history of SETI research of this connection of thinking exoplanetary life with thinking about racism at home. David Rittenhouse, an early American astronomer, pondered how extraterrestrial lives might actually be better off uncontacted by humans, and thus not knowing of the miseries of slavery on Earth. In his 1775 address to the American Philosophical Society, Rittenhouse imagined such ETIs as happy already, “And perhaps more happy still, that all communication with us is denied. We have neither corrupted you with our vices nor injured you by violence. None of your sons and daughters, degraded from their native dignity, have been doomed to endless slavery by us in America, merely because their bodies may be disposed to reflect or absorb the rays of light, in a way different from ours” (qtd. in Crowe 212). Here is a striking reversal of the trope that the alien is the toxic other—in Rittenhouse’s view, those who practice slavery threaten to toxify others by spreading the vice of racism across the universe.

A more methodologically diverse SETI, in the search for cosmological biodiversity, would work towards contributing to the emergent field of critical habitability studies. While SETI continues to draw from tropes in science fiction, there remains limited dialogue between the history of scientific study of ETI and the multidisciplinary reflections in the humanities on conceptualizing otherness, the racial legacies informing conceptualizations of aliens, and the harsh histories of contested habitability on Earth.⁵

The point is, even if we cannot (yet) talk to aliens, we need to talk about aliens. If we are to understand our own planetary condition and assume responsibility for how we inhabit our planet, we need to practice a planetary thinking that includes awareness of how planets become habitable in different ways and how planets might arrive at social, biological, and technological bottlenecks or impasses. Thinking the Anthropocene entails thinking like a planet; thinking like a planet entails thinking the history of environs and environmental justice together with conceptualizing the habitability of other worlds. Dipesh Chakrabarty comments that, even as it is necessary to translate the planet into a humanist category (“The Planet” 1), coming to terms with the distressing ecological changes on Earth requires a perspective that includes scientific study of how other planets have undergone extreme environmental transformations: “The scientific problem of climate change thus emerges from what may be called comparative planetary studies and entails a degree of interplanetary research and thinking” (“Climate and Capital” 23). Thinking humanistically about the planet, which for Chakrabarty entails cognizing how “the planet as such has emerged as a site of existential concern” (“The Planet” 4), would include thinking of what can be called the interplanetary humanities in the context of a potential plurality of worlds. SETI research and thinking envisaged thus would play a role in understanding Earth as a planet among planets and in shaping the trajectory of planetary thinking in the environmental humanities. The result is that the scientific and cultural implications of SETI will help inform the humanistic thinking about our planet and vice versa. This double conceptualization would proceed along the lines of what NASA scientist Mark Lupisella describes as the “two-way relationship” that “suggest[s] that culture and cosmos are important for each other” (323).⁶ My argument in this essay is that attending to key examples of literary and philosophical inquiry on habitability can provide a model for how to comprehend SETI as intersecting more broadly with the humanities and humanities work as contributing to SETI.

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There may be no better philosopher to talk to about aliens than Kant. If bestowing attention on Kant’s enthusiasm for aliens seems initially embarrassing, Peter Szendy, in his marvelous book Kant in the Land of the Extraterrestrials (Kant chez les extraterrestres: Philosofictions cosmopolitiques, 2011), will spare our blushes. Szendy relates, “I remember the faces and the bemused or incredulous smiles in the audience when I happened to pronounce the following sentence in public: Kant did indeed speak of extraterrestrials” (4). The audience thought Szendy might be putting them on, or performing one of those outlandish moments in continental theory. However, Kant let it be known throughout his career that he thought quite philosophically about aliens. In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant declared he would place his bets on there being aliens. “If it were possible to settle by any sort of experience whether there are inhabitants of at least some of the planets that we see, I might well bet everything that I have on it. Hence I say that it is not merely an opinion but a strong belief (on the correctness of which I would wager many advantages in life) that there are also inhabitants of other worlds” (687). Kant’s point is that there is justified belief in thinking other planets are inhabited and making bets on that belief, even if there could be no certainty because such experience, while not impossible in the future, was unavailable in Kant’s time. Szendy finds Kant so committed to thinking the inhabitants of other planets that, “To my great surprise, Kant even went so far as to propose a kind of comparative theory or classification of these beings living on other planets, more or less a rational alienology” (5).

Analyzing Kant’s passages on the rational basis for thinking the plurality of inhabited planets provides an opportunity to sketch out some of the basic conceptualizations that are implicit in what I discuss as a chiasmus of Kant’s thinking of SETI and philosophy. I’ll start with Kant’s early writing on the topic and describe it as positing a great abundance thesis, the assumption that the plurality of planets must also mean a plurality of inhabitants. Michael J. Crowe points to how this thesis adapts classical Greek philosophical claims of the “principle of plenitude” (the notion that the universe contains all forms of being [139]) into a position on SETI and the habitability of exoplanets. In his Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755), Kant sought to combine Newtonian mechanical laws and philosophical logic as foundational to a naturalism applicable across the universe. After remarks on the formation and motion of planets, Kant allowed himself in the last chapter to use philosophical reasoning to formulate speculations on the inhabitability of these worlds. His conclusion: “I am of the opinion that it is just not necessary to assert that all planets must be inhabited, even though it would be nonsense to deny this in regard to all or even only most of them. In view of the wealth of nature in which worlds or systems are only specks of dust in the sunlight compared with the whole of creation, there might well be empty and uninhabited regions that are not being used completely for the purpose of nature, namely for the contemplation of rational beings” (295). Kant continues the analogical association that many worlds leads to many planetary denizens in his postulation that “most of the planets are certainly inhabited and those that are not will be at some stage” (297). The key initial assumption that leads to the great abundance thesis is that if there is life on Earth, then life is likely to be found on just about all planets, since planets are formed and moved according to a “universal natural history.” Kant then allows himself a further hypothesis about what such aliens are like as he ventures that planetary intelligence is relative to distance from the sun, with planets closer to the sun stunted in intelligence and planets furthest from the sun containing “the most sublime classes of rational creatures” (301). Earthlings are reasonable enough, but the outer planets are supposed to host even more rational beings.

Kant’s theorization that the abundance of life on Earth would find an analogue in the abundance of alien life on other planets is an example of what W. T. Sullivan calls “the Great Analogy,” the use of comparative reasoning to extrapolate from “Earth and its life to other extraterrestrial locales and their possible life” (74). These reflections on an inhabited cosmos will, in turn, come to be logically implied in Kant’s theorization of a “cosmopolitan right”—an early example of SETI thinking having a role in framing philosophical conceptions of justice on Earth. In his 1784 essay “Idea for a Universal History with Cosmopolitan Purpose,” Kant conceived of human history as a progression towards “a universal cosmopolitan existence, [which] will at last be realized as the matrix within which all the original capacities of the human race may develop” (Political Writings 51). What is truly the mark of dignity in human nature is not the human condition itself but the capacity for social progress towards justice to be measured at a planetary scale applicable to all of the human species: “The greatest problem for the human species, the solution of which nature compels him to seek, is that of attaining a civil society which can administer justice universally” (45).

However, Kant, in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), saw an inherent limitation in the conceptualization of the cosmopolitan purposiveness of human reason. Kant argued that humanity could continue to improve on its practical realization of the principles of justice, pursuing a maximum of freedom and of law for all. But humans ultimately could not tell if they were achieving the fullness of universal cosmopolitan reason that might be possible given the affordances and limitations of human nature. In a remark that must have surprised many, Kant suggested that only a non-human rational being could properly provide a comparison for assessing the historical achievements of human practical reason. And since no other rational beings lived on earth, only an extraterrestrial being could provide such a perspective: “The highest concept of species may be that of a terrestrial rational being, but we will not be able to describe its characteristics because we do not know of a nonterrestrial rational being which would enable us to refer to its properties and consequently classify that terrestrial being as rational. It seems, therefore, that the problem of giving an account of the character of the human species is quite insoluble, because the problem could only be solved by comparing two species of rational beings on the basis of experience, but experience has not offered us a comparison between two species of rational beings” (237–38).

Kant had already suggested in Theory of the Heavens that he thought it possible there were more rational beings on other planets. In his Anthropology, he integrates such speculative thoughts on ETI within an articulation of human ontology and a “pragmatic point of view” on the means by which human character can be coordinated with the reason of universal cosmopolitan right. In order to see if humanity’s pragmatic point of view achieves what it is capable of according to a universal cosmopolitanism, another rational being must be sought out to offer such a comparative assessment. Since that ETI point of view is not available to human experience at the time of Kant’s writing, and perhaps may not ever be experienced, the next best step is to imagine what such an alien might say. No doubt such an alien visitor would observe all sorts of human conflicts, wars, and anti-social behaviors. Hence Kant’s assessment of humanity seen from an alien point of view is not very promising: “If we now ask whether the human species can be considered a good or bad race (it can be called a race only when one thinks of it as a species of rational beings on earth, compared to those rational beings on other planets, sprung as a multitude of creatures from one demiurge), then I confess that there is not much to boast about” (249).

This quite remarkable statement seems deeply pessimistic at first glance. Kant follows it with a crafty sentence to defend himself from accusations of misanthropy, and suggests that humans are not inherently prone to evil but rather susceptible to foolishness. Yet to even make such assessments of human character as a whole, Kant tells us he must put the human species on the same scales as “rational beings on other planets.” In order to address and assess ourselves, we would have to imagine ourselves as if involved in a kind of interplanetary cosmopolitical forum. In such a forum, a rational alien other could supply the third order observation that we lack, to judge how our judgments have been universalized in accordance with our own human capacities for freedom and lawfulness.

At this juncture, in the closing sentences of Anthropology, Kant reincorporates this comparative interplanetary reflection into the self-reflexive capacity already inherent in reason. Such self-reflexivity is built into the conditions of possibility of rational cognition—human or alien—and can be used to pull humanity out of its tendency towards internecine strife. What first appeared to be a withering take on humanity’s failure to universalize its potential for cosmopolitan reason actually becomes evidence for the capacity for progress because “such a condemning judgment reveals a moral capacity of the species, an innate summons of reason, to work against that tendency” (251). Humans have a self-critical capacity that can disarm humanity’s own misanthropic tendencies. One element of that self-critique is the imaginary capacity to join in a universal cosmopolitan reason that exceeds the perspective of humans on Earth. The moral capacity includes the possibility of welcoming and incorporating a critical higher-reasoning judgment, be that judgment from aliens or from the pursuit of universal cosmopolitan reason itself. Indeed, Kant is exemplifying his own argument in imagining the way aliens inhabit their own planet,⁷ and using that scenario to assess how humans inhabit the Earth, to show how to stretch the mind and flex the self-critical consciousness. Such speculative conversation with aliens demonstrates the very means by which humans might also improve their own efforts towards a “cosmopolitan society” that cannot actually be fully realized and serves as a “regulative principle” (249). The faculties for reasoning exemplified in the three critiques—the transcendental capacity for the ego to cognize a priori, engage in practical reason, and subject aesthetic judgments to universal consensus—can thus be employed in a remarkable way that would allow for a kind of universal cosmopolitan congress, which may never become a reality but most certainly can serve as an imaginative corrective to human development.

Szendy, in his delightful discussion of Kant’s tarrying with the alien, relishes pointing out how Kant incorporates a populated cosmos into the philosophical realm of the three critiques. As Szendy shows, Kant doesn’t even need to use the trope of contact, because “what we now need to think through with the greatest philosophical rigor is that they have always already been here” (40). Derrida’s “toujours déjà” phrase is here enciphered into Kant’s philosophy, but actually the source of the phrase is otherworldly. What humans must “always already” reckon with is not just rational aliens but the alien within reason itself. To spell out the implications here, thinking SETI does not necessarily mean actually thinking about aliens, but recognizing methodologically and formally how human consciousness imbricates within itself an alien consciousness. This alien consciousness is ultimately in a paradoxical way deeply intimate yet radically unthinkable at the same time. In Kant’s thinking, humans and aliens are radically the same—they share a capacity for universal cosmopolitan reason. But humans and aliens are radically different in that each species would have progressed towards that universal horizon at a different pace, with different biophysical affordances or limitations, and along planet-specific histories. Furthermore, each offers something that the other can never have on its own – an exoplanetary perspective.

Szendy parses humanity’s implication in this alien otherness: “humanity… must be thought from the perspective of its other, from outside, quite precisely where this outside has not yet been given a figure or a face, since it is deprived of all our possible figurations. In short, humanity must be thought on the basis of the wholly other whose radical alterity cannot be localized in a circumscribed outside” (39). Let’s give Szendy the space to elaborate more poetically the reverberations of this alien alterity already structurally involved in humanity:

[W]e Earthlings, we humans, we see (ourselves) only under the condition of the other’s gaze; we have a point of view only if we allow it to be haunted by the wholly other. Which is faraway, at an infinite distance in the light-years that distance it from us, and yet so close, stuck to our point of view to the point that it redoubles it. This wholly other is the gap of seeing that alone allows for something like a point of view. It’s the intergalactic distance that is lodged in the most intimate or minute angle, between eye and eye.

(136)

However far away such aliens might be, perhaps too far to ever be directly contacted, they are what Lacan calls “extimate,” an external already intimate within our own most inner thoughts. Humans and aliens share a transcendental cognitive structure, and they also share a special kind of non-cognition or “gap of seeing” through which the perspective of the other alone can enter. Kant views human interactions as fundamentally corroborated by sameness or a sensus communis; he does not view human-to-human relations under the paradigm of self/other relations. This paradigm of sameness also applies to aliens. Thus only another nonhuman rational being can inhabit this position of intimate alterity already structurally prepared within the human mind. No other animal on Earth suffices as a rational other, according to Kant, and nature by its noumenal properties and inaccessible (yet presumed) purposiveness also cannot play the role of the conscious alien other.

Szendy does not press Kant on the questionable hierarchies of reason that the philosopher relies on that prohibit any profound engagements with animals—a limitation to both Kant and Szendy’s work that I will pursue further in the discussion of Ted Chiang’s story. Both thinkers also fall short of considering the possibility that alien contact, in “person” or by radio communication, likely will be with a post-biological entity or cyborg, since the technological means required for interstellar contact suggests a civilization advanced enough to have also reached a point of “singularity” or enhanced super-convergence of the biological and the technological. Szendy is content to have remarked on the deconstructive logic of Kant’s alien others as an example of what he calls a “philosofiction” (46), an incorporation of science fiction into the methodology of philosophy. In this philosofiction scenario, the Kantian “as if,” which operates at the heart of the faculty of aesthetic judgment by accepting the fictive coordination of the freedom of will and the imagination with the implied order and purposiveness of nature, is shown to be articulated alongside an alien “as if.”

Szendy finds similar implications of “cosmopolitical philosofictions” in the work of Carl Schmitt, Edmund Husserl, Derrida, and Emmanuel Levinas, each of whom entertains at key moments how the alien point of view from exoplanetary space fundamentally changes conceptualizations of dwelling, cosmopolitanism, and human being on Earth. If we heed this alien point of view within the cosmopolitan, Szendy indicates we must re-evaluate Heidegger’s distinction of world and Earth as imbricated in exoplanetary engagements. We must rethink planetary dwelling on Earth as already implicated in the root word of the Greek planêtes, which means wandering, errant, and nomadic (Greek astronomers observed that planets moved in irregular motions compared to stars). Yet, missed here is the opportunity to continue the analysis of how SETI research itself is changed by this recognition of a nonhuman alien point of view as contributing to the conditions of possibility of the human point of view. How might then SETI research in turn change how we inhabit the Earth and our own bodily experiences? How should this imbrication of other worlds in our world change how we understand the methods and terms of sharing the Earth and cultivating environmentalism and the environmental humanities on our own planet?

There is a basic principle implied in SETI according to which we can assume that anything we can think about the lives of aliens and their knowledge of interstellar communication would be something the aliens would have already thought as well (for example, if we are using radio telescopes to look for signals, aliens would be doing the same thing). Following Kant and Szendy, there is a step further to be taken in this bidirectional relation: just as aliens are, at least cognitively, already here, so humans are already there, already affecting the consciousness and habitability of life on other planets. We already play a role as an alien other for other planets in their progression towards a universal cosmopolitical organization, whether or not it is fictional or real, just as that alien “cosmopolitical philosofiction” plays a role on Earth.

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Kant did not cease to marvel at what looking at the skies meant for life on Earth. He concluded Critique of Practical Reason with the observation: “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence the more often and more steadily one reflects on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not need to search for them and merely conjecture them as they were veiled in obscurity or in the transcendent region beyond my horizon; I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my existence” (269). It is easy to see this statement as echoing the conclusion of his earlier Theory of the Heavens: “the view of the starry sky on a clear night gives one a kind of pleasure that only noble souls feel” (Natural Science 307). Kant conceived of the cosmological expanse, the plurality of worlds, and the possibility of life on other planets as a pleasurable activity. He writes at a time when astronomy itself is a figure for a more perfect world. Kant reckons with aliens as potential co-philosophers, not unknowable others or existential threats. He has no inkling of the notion of a nefarious alien visitor to Earth who would scoff at the notion of a rational cosmopolitan congress and would rather have in mind to colonize the planet and dominate humanity—a scenario that Steven J. Dick notes can first be credited to H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898).⁸

However, there may not be a universal cosmopolitan congress if Kant’s presupposition that there is an implicitly shared plane of reason among differing species proves untrue. Perhaps it was Kant himself who already implied this fracture across biological lines when he dismissed all animals as excluded from the capacity for exercising rational self-reflexive cognition and forming cosmopolitical bonds. The opening sentences of Anthropology establish this human hierarchy and exclusionary stance towards animals: “The fact that man is aware of an ego-concept raises him infinitely above all other creatures living on earth. Because of this, he is a person…. He is a being who, by reason of his preeminence and dignity, is wholly different from things, such as the irrational animals whom he can master and rule at will” (9).⁹ Kant is not filled with a sense of admiration or pleasure when contemplating animal others.

The contemporary American science fiction author Ted Chiang, in his short story “The Great Silence,” piercingly reflects on how the desire to look up at the skies and contemplate alien contact frequently corresponds to a refusal to look down and around at the forms of contact among interspecies others on Earth. The story is told from the first-person perspective of a Puerto Rican parrot (Amazona vittata) (an impossible position, according to Kant, since parrots cannot be persons) situated in the vicinity of the massive radio telescope near the Puerto Rican city of Aricebo. Puerto Rican parrots, which only live on the island, are critically endangered; the population plummeted in the last century, with just 16 counted in the early 1970s and currently numbering fewer than 500. The Aricebo Observatory has served for nearly 60 years as an important technology in SETI research, used by scientists both for searching for interstellar radio communications and for sending out messages to nearby star systems. (Sadly, the telescope collapsed in December 2020 and the future of the observatory is uncertain.) The parrot begins the story stating, “The humans use Arecibo to look for extraterrestrial intelligence. Their desire to make a connection is so strong that they’ve created an ear capable of hearing across the universe. But I and my fellow parrots are right here. Why aren’t they interested in listening to our voices?” (231).¹⁰ The entirety of the story is a monologue from the parrot, poised on the brink of extinction, who is witness to the human drive to make contact across interstellar distances while ignoring the experiential and scientific richness of cross-species contact on Earth.

The title, “The Great Silence,” the parrot tells us, ostensibly refers to the Fermi paradox (Chiang 232). The nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi, in an informal chat with fellow scientists one summer in 1950, asked why there is no evidence of alien presence in the cosmos despite it being statistically likely there is life elsewhere in the universe. Given the billions of years that our own galaxy has existed, and the indication even in Fermi’s time that other solar systems might have inhabitable planets, why has not some extraterrestrial life form shown itself to be present? The paradox could easily be resolved if it is the case that we are alone in the universe. There are many clever hypotheses as to why there is no conclusive evidence yet of any ETI out there. One possibility, germane to Chiang’s story, is that civilizations become extinct before they can manage to become spacefaring or communicate across interstellar distances. The reality of the sixth mass extinction event on Earth, precipitated by technologically advanced humans, suggests a pattern other planetary life has undergone that links extinction and technological development. Chiang’s title that resonates across the story—the Great Silence—which could be due to regular cosmic extinction events, is also the diminishing of biodiverse life on Earth, and the quietness of humanity in response to the cries of endangered species like the Puerto Rican parrot.

Both SETI and human/non-human animal relations are concerned with attention to the nuances of contact. At its most elementary, contact is the maintenance and awareness of some kind of connection or relation that is felt to be significant. Contact is immersion in relation, an experience of being-with or being-in-touch no matter the physical proximity. Every communicative act involves contact, which is one of the six functions that Roman Jakobson identified as constitutive of every linguistic utterance.¹¹ Communicative contact, whether human-to-human or human-to-nonhuman animal, need not be semantic. So much of communication is not content but contact.

Chiang’s parrot narrator relates how other parrots have reached out with their “contact calls” to humans. The story recalls the work of animal researcher Irene Pepperberg who spent thirty years working to study and communicate with a grey parrot named Alex that she had originally purchased at a pet shop. Alex could reply in conversations using over 100 English words, identify objects and colors, and express wants. Alex proved to his attendees and the scientific community that parrots possessed the capacity for intentional language use. Just as important, Alex showed Irene the importance of inter-species contact and the appreciation of just being-with one another. The parrot in Chiang’s story relates that “Alex died suddenly, when he was still relatively young. The evening before he died, Alex said to Pepperberg, ‘You be good. I love you.’ If humans are looking for a connection with a nonhuman intelligence, what more can they ask for than that?” (Chiang 232). For her part, Pepperberg says that she very much received this contact call:

The most profound lesson that Alex taught us concerns the place of Homo sapiens in nature. The revolution in animal cognition of which Alex was an important part teaches us that humans are not unique, as we long believed. We are not superior to all other beings in nature. The idea of humans’ separateness from the rest of nature is no longer tenable. Alex taught us that we are a part of nature, not apart from nature. The “separateness” notion was a dangerous illusion that gave us permission to exploit every aspect of the natural world – animal, plant, mineral – without consequences. We are now facing those consequences: poverty, starvation, and climate change, for example.

(Alex & Me 222)

Pepperberg directly connects the neglect of animal contact as contributing to the runaway problems of the Anthropocene. It’s not just animal extinction that can be precipitated by the ignorance of contact—the panoply of environmental problems and oppressive social systems connect to a history of claims for human civilizational privilege premised on separateness from animals. The Puerto Rican parrot relates that parrots have their own myths and rituals that are endemic to their communities. Extinction, the parrot achingly details, is not just a biological loss, “It’s also the disappearance of our language, our rituals, our traditions. It’s the silencing of our voice” (Chiang 235). The parrot’s speech resonates with how extinction events, for animals as well as for human communities, involve the loss of generations, entire worlds, and ways of life. The devastation of the Puerto Rican parrot population is just one extinction event among others in Puerto Rican history, beginning with the destruction of the Taíno people. The continued neglect of Puerto Rican peoples and the island’s biodiversity today is another example of how the erasure of animal life connects to the erasure of racialized peoples.¹²

The Fermi paradox, embedded in the Anthropocene, may be explained by the irony that the science and technology that allow a civilization to become spacefaring also relies on extractivism, exploitation, and climate-changing processes that undermines that planet’s life. Instead of asking aliens how to escape the bottleneck of the Anthropocene, it would be easier to ask counsel of our animal neighbors. The only way out of this paradox, as Chiang’s parrot recognizes, is that SETI must be folded into multispecies relations and multispecies relations into SETI. Since Chiang’s “The Great Silence” is a fictional work, we can map such a convergence onto another one whereby the cosmopolitical union needed to share the planet combines with the cosmo-poetical domain in which parrots, humans, and aliens can converse and imagine their worlds conjoining. But the Puerto Rican parrot does not think that humans are willing to make good on interspecies contact: “My species probably won’t be here for much longer; it’s likely that we’ll die before our time and join the Great Silence. But before we go, we are sending a message to humanity. We just hope the telescope at Arecibo will enable them to hear it” (Chiang 236). The parrot’s last words converge with its contact call: “The message is this: You be good. I love you” (236). The paradoxes and ambivalences continue in this last message. How can humans be good after such an extinction event? What is love in a time of radical loss? What is contact on an unshared Earth? Even if communication is eventually made with an alien life, resolving the Fermi paradox, the plural paradoxes of contact will still continue to question us even as they may fill us with admiration and reverence.