Archaeology, Anthropology, and Interstellar Communication
He began his path-breaking work with the NASA SETI community in the mid-1980s, commencing perhaps the most sustained connection of a single anthropologist with SETI. Under a National Research Council program to bring university scientists into government labs, Finney applied anthropological methods to SETI’s assumptions. He challenged some of its assumptions on the basis of terrestrial experience with deciphering ancient Egyptian and Mayan inscriptions.18 Most important was the book Interstellar Migration and the Human Experience, edited by Finney and Eric Jones. The result of a conference on interstellar migration held in 1983 at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), where Jones worked as an astrophysicist, this collection of essays concentrated on yet another aspect of SETI, the possibility of interstellar colonization. Finney and Jones invited anthropologists, demographers, historians, paleontologists, and philosophers as well as astronomers, physicists, and machine intelligence specialists to discuss the subject of interstellar migration. Among the anthropologists were Joseph Birdsell, Nancy Tanner, and Finney himself. On the basis of humanity’s evolutionary and historical past, and its characteristic expansionary, technologically innovative, and inquisitive nature, Finney and Jones made this prediction in the volume’s epilogue: “Mankind is headed for the stars. That is our credo. Our descendants will one day live throughout the Solar System and eventually seek to colonize other star systems and possibly interstellar space itself. Immense problems—technical, economic, political, and social—will have to be solved for human life to spread through space.” They recognized the dangers of hubris and of repeating discredited expansionary and imperialistic themes of history. Yet they concluded that “although we obviously cannot predict that human descendants will colonize the entire Galaxy, we are betting that they will try.”19 This dispersion of humanity among the stars would bring not only cultural diversity but also new species descended from humans, as well as new cultures. They did not resolve the Fermi paradox. But whether life on other planets turns out to be alien or descended from humans, anthropologists and social scientists in general will surely be anxious to study cultures beyond Earth.
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