UAP, NHI: The next frontier of investment and inquiry
Coming on the heels of this weekend’s Sol Foundation inaugural symposium at Stanford University, I’m left with several convictions—some newer, some already held but stronger than ever.
UAP will be the biggest news of 2024. For those new to the acronym, UAP stands for unidentified anomalous phenomena. This nomenclature comes straight out of Congressional legislation. The latest is the pending “Schumer amendment”—officially titled the “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) Disclosure Act of 2023”—sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and several other notables. This is a bill of epic proportions, requiring the disclosure of information and artifacts of intelligent non-human origin. To put it too bluntly, the most senior lawmakers want to admit that the United States Government is in possession of alien spacecraft (there, I said it!). Recent whistleblowers and insiders are corroborating the same core claims revealed in this bill. See for yourself—pick any page. The bill’s press release has Sen. Schumer saying, “The American public has a right to learn about technologies of unknown origins, non-human intelligence, and unexplainable phenomena. We are not only working to declassify what the government has previously learned about these phenomena but to create a pipeline for future research to be made public.” It’s worth underlining just how much coordination this took with senior members of the executive branch, including the National Security Council. This is incredibly serious business.
Sol’s inaugural symposium was a sea change. The Sol Foundation aims to be the premier science, policy, and education platform reckoning with the presence of UAP and non-human intelligence (NHI). “The Sol Foundation brings together experts from academia and government to address the philosophical, policy, and scientific problems raised by the likely presence on the Earth of UAP.” At this invite-only weekend event, it wasn’t just the gravity of the presentations and leaders that made this conference notable. It was the sense of common cause—the informed working assumption that something serious is afoot and we’re going to responsibly steward the news into every domain. As UVA sociologist James Davison Hunter has argued, culture changes finally not so much through grassroots movements but through dense networks of institutional leaders working for common cause. Mass movements can influence decision-makers, sure, but it still takes major and sustained coordination among leaders to rearrange cultural power. That’s what we’re seeing through Sol, and elsewhere, not least in the tectonic shifts happening in coordination between the executive and legislative branches opening the aperture on recovered materials originating from NHI.
It’s time to prepare investment strategies. Reasoning from first principles is enough to generate endless questions and hypotheses about how the revelation of non-human intelligence, recovered artifacts and craft, and more, might inform future investments. How are funds and institutions with R&D arms prepared to follow this news and the means of access to be rolled out? What researchers and analysts are tracking what’s unfolding, and paying attention to how some entities are already preparing? Broadly speaking, our thesis at Future Folklore is that the search for and engagement with the domain of non-human intelligent life and off-world life should be the premier organizing principle for future human innovation. This includes the strategies of mainstream SETI, astrobiology, and the many other search modes. But I think of UAP as the “hottest lead” in the search. The findings from any of these methods could prove to be decades- and centuries-long innovation engines. But the engineering challenges required to engage the topic are monumental, inspiring technologies that benefit us closer to home. This is not to mention the nourishment to the human spirit from efforts to reach out to or at least observe possible cosmic neighbors. As we consider AGI and AI under similar auspices, it’s clear 2024 will be a year of reckoning with non-human intelligence on multiple fronts.
Future Folklore is prepared to lead. Our Off-world Incubator is onboarding new founders and projects into a community of those seriously engaging this vast domain. While we’re tech-oriented, we also have projects building educational platforms and new media products. Much of our growing network of founders emerges from a community already invested in questions surrounding other forms of life, bringing years of studied wisdom and insights hard-won through personal reckoning. These are passion projects, but they’re much more. These are leading indicators of new market sectors and transforming impacts on familiar markets. We’re quickly iterating incubator rounds both to grow the ecosystem of leaders and projects and to explore where there’s potential. As funding sources wake up to the possibilities here, we’ll already have a strong community of contenders and know-how.
Do you have a fund or R&D arm, and want to start getting involved through investments or partnerships? There’s not a better time than now.
Ready?
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-Joel
Founder, Future Folklore