This month’s feature comes from Michael Bohlander, Chair in Global Law and SETI Policy at Durham Law School (UK). Prof. Bohlander previously served as an international judge at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia in Phnom Penh (2015-2019), which addressed crimes allegedly committed during the Khmer Rouge period, and is on the roster of international judges at the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague (2017 to the present). Prior to joining Durham University in 2004, Bohlander was a judge in his native Germany and also served as the senior legal officer of a Trial Chamber at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.
The impact of contact with extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI ) on human society will be serious to catastrophic, depending on the kind of contact. The wider SETI community has considered various contact scenarios and issued a number of declarations, none of which have legal force, however. Law is a discipline that should be at the forefront of creating a proper governance framework. In the words of Steven J. Dick, the former Chief Historian of the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), “SETI is way behind the curve when it comes to legal implications of discovering intelligent life”.
This applies even more in the case of direct contact, which might even trigger military responses on behalf of all of humanity if ETI were to be hostile, and raise questions of whether the interhuman laws of warfare should apply to ETI if humanity were fighting for species survival. If this may seem fringe to some, it is because humanity has not yet developed a planetary or cosmic species awareness, or because many simply accept the prevailing narrative that any ETI contacted will be either vastly more advanced and powerful and hence impossible to resist, or in any event be benign in nature. Neither can be taken for granted.
If there is a “Galactic Club” to which humanity as a whole might in time wish to aspire, we should expect to fulfil certain membership criteria and be in a grounded position to decide whether these criteria are compatible with global human ethical parameters. Human rights law in particular can serve as a ready guideline for ethical discussions of what humanity might be willing to trade for access to the Club if that was a precondition to accessing technology that could possibly solve all problems around energy, food production, climate, and poverty on Earth. Human rights law has so far been conspicuously absent as an avenue of ethics study in the SETI environment.
Humanity at this time has no answers for any of those questions. The time to begin serious efforts to address them is now, when reflections about contact of any kind are entering the scientific and popular mainstream much more than was the case previously, especially following the June 2021 report to the US Congress on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) and the recent call by NASA in October 2021 to embed the search for extraterrestrial life in all research activities.
More detail on these arguments can be found in my recent papers: Metalaw – What is it good for? (2021,188 Acta Astronautica, 400 – 404) and Joining the “Galactic Club”: What Price Admission? – A hypothetical case study of the impact of human rights on a future accession of humanity to interstellar civilisation networks (2021,132 Futures, 102801). I am currently finishing a monograph to be published in 2023 in the series Space and Society, with the working title “Conflict with Extraterrestrial Intelligence and Human Law – A speculative study of the impact of interspecies conflict on humanitarian and human rights law.”
A number of academics from different fields at Durham University are currently developing plans for a multi-disciplinary Centre for Cosmic Impact (CCI). As part of this process, we are organizing a hybrid symposium on 4 July 2022, with the title “Space, Law and Alien Life – Combined Approaches to Astrobiology, Law and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.” Information on how to attend the event, either in person or remotely, can be found at this link. Durham Law School will also host the 2022 hybrid Annual Meeting of the UK SETI Research Network (UKSRN) on 7-8 July 2022. Find details about how to join the meeting and read the full programme at the conference website.