There’s more to studying outer space than looking through telescopes and analyzing the mineral compounds in samples collected from the surface of Mars.
Beyond the biological and physical questions about what life might be like out there, a growing number of social scientists are asking questions about how and why we imagine intergalactic beings the way we do.
Anne Johnson, an anthropologist at Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico, is one of them and joined The Show to discuss.
Full conversation
ANNE JOHNSON: There's so many things to look at and ways of looking at outer space. Some anthropologists have taken up a really popular topic, which is aliens, right? And UFOs and sort of how people imagine what life might be like in outer space, which gives us a lot of information about how people think about what it means to be human.
SAM DINGMAN: Yeah. Well, on that subject of how we imagined the non-earthly beings, have there been common traits amongst accounts from people who claim to have knowledge of, of interaction with alien life forms?
JOHNSON: There's a kind of general idea through the media, right, of what an alien looks like. And sometimes people sort of internalize that, and then what they know they're going to see is what they end up seeing. From Mexico, which is where I work, everybody's seen something. Everybody's seen something strange. There's certain parts of the country that are known for being sort of sinister and strange things happen there, and there are strange forces and strange lights. So people are very open to the idea that there might be something out there.
I've had some conversation with people, for example, who don't have anything to do with space but have have had these sort of visions of other unusual lights and things say, “well, when I think about what it would be like for the humans to go to outer space where we really wouldn't want to be invaders, right?” Like we've got invaded in Mexico, so we wouldn't really want to invade other people's or other beings' environment or Earth or planets or land like, like we invaded ourselves. So there's a lot of sort of using this, this idea of the alien to really reflect on what knowledge is and what power is, on Earth.
DINGMAN: That's really interesting. It makes me think about a line from a piece of yours that I read where you talk about the combination of looking up and looking down. The idea that somebody thinking about this question of alien life and traveling to outer space, somebody from Mexico looking up in the sense of dreaming about that, but then also looking down and saying like, “well, what has my experience of that been here?” I can imagine where that combination of directional looking would collide in different ways, depending on where the curiosity originates geographically.
JOHNSON: Yeah. And there's, you know, there's interesting overlaps and you'll hear a lot of discourse in Mexico. People will say, “oh, well, outer space is amazing. And it helps us really imagine, like the immensity of the universe. And it's really cool to look at the stars, but at the same time, we're never going to go there because that's that's for the gringos, right? That's for the people who have money to go to outer space. Yeah, we've heard that there's all this space tourism. It's not going to be something that we do.” So there's a real like social, political sort of critical reflection combined with this sort of curiosity and on wonder that space absolutely does inspire.
DINGMAN: So far in our conversation, we've been talking a lot about the ways that we on Earth look to the heavens and create what you've referred to as outer space imaginaries. What life might be like up there, how it might impact our life were we to go there.
But are there any conversations within the space anthropology community about the opposite scenario, that life forms from outer space might come here, and that we might have to adjust our lives here to that eventuality?
JOHNSON: As far as life forms coming here, I think some of the most interesting work isn't so much sort of predictive, like how will we deal or how will we interact, but how do people imagine contact? So there's all this, this very sort of us and Eurocentric fear around aggression and war. And how will we fight and how will we defend ourselves? Because surely aliens will be aggressive, right?
But they're also other sort of futurism, right, or other imaginaries of the alien, like I said. And in Indigenous communities, for example, there might be an idea that beings from outer space are illuminated or can become part of an earthly relationship or will come and help us.
DINGMAN: I mean, I think that's such a beautiful idea that I hadn't considered until this conversation, the idea that perhaps other beings would come here on a mission purely of curiosity or their own mission of care. And it's striking for me in this moment to realize that I would never have considered that possibility, but I've just seen too many movies that have given me that kind of blinders that imagine that it would only be an attack.
But this makes me think of another one of the really interesting quotes from your piece that I wanted to talk to you about, which is:
"Humanity's cosmic leanings have always been fair game for anthropological study, as they point to questions of identity and alterity, as well as humanity's need to transcend mundane existence."
And what's interesting to me about the idea, I guess, that other beings would come here looking to help us is that it could be viewed as a kind of magical thinking, like perhaps the answer to our problems lies outside of us, and we don't have to solve our own problems.
JOHNSON: Sure. Yeah, yeah, somebody will come and just and take care of this for us. Or will or we will just fail at everything and have to leave the planet. That's another. That's something that I, I hear a lot, especially with, with sort of space boosters who think about the idea of a planet B, right, like you messed up planet A, so now I have to go to Mars because we don't really have a choice. Which is not helpful.
But yeah, there's sort of a transcendence in it. And it's funny because I certainly something that you hear from people who are sort of more have a more mystical bent, I guess, or, more interested in sort of alien, the possibility, the alien. But I also hear there's a transcendence that you even hear from engineers, which was really surprising to me that I was working with satellite engineers.
And one of them, he was calculating orbits for his is the satellite he was going to send into low Earth orbit, and made this sort of beautiful art piece of, like, satellite trajectories and calculations and said, “oh, it's it's going to be like, as if I could go to the cosmos and like, dance in the immensity of the universe, but I can't go, but my satellite can go.” So it's surprising how poetic a lot of engagements with outer space may be, even if it's from the sort of techno-scientific point of view.
