First contact with aliens could end in colonization and genocide if we don’t learn from history

We're only halfway through 2023, and it feels already like the year of alien contact. In a promising act of disciplinary inclusion, the Berkeley SETI Research Center in 2018 invited working groups – including our Indigenous studies working group – from outside STEM fields to craft perspective papers for SETI scientists to consider. Theodor de Bry/Wikimedia Commons The working group statement also suggested that the act of listening is itself already within a "phase of contact." John Hamilton Mortimer via the National Library of Australia The Royal Society gave Cook a "prime directive" of doing no harm and to only conduct research that would broadly benefit humanity. As scholars attuned to both research ethics and histories of colonialism, we wrote about Cook in our working group statement to showcase why SETI might want to explicitly disentangle their intentions from those of corporations, the military and the government.