PSETI Seminar: From the Spirit Board to the 100-Meter: Locating SETI in the Religious History of the United States

PSETI Seminar
February 16, 2023
Connor Martini

Abstract:
When we talk about the relationship between science and religion, we tend to get bogged down in controversies and conflicts between Christian theologians and secular scientists—the Scopes Trial, Intelligent Design, etc. But there are other stories to be told about religion and science, stories that are not conciliatory just for the sake of minimizing instances of genuine discord but which serve to highlight the questions that bounce back and forth across the porous boundaries between religion and science and the complex human actors who ask them. These stories become infinitely easier to tell when we allow for “religion” to mean other things besides Christianity and “science” to be more than evolutionary biology. The telling of this story, instead, will attempt to trace a series of questions and concerns though upstate New York in the mid-19th Century, through New Orleans during the Civil War, through the advent of radio telescopes and the genesis of SETI. These questions and concerns look to the horizon of human technological development with a spirit of curiosity and possibility: what is it that we do not know, and what might our tools permit us to hear?