An otherworldly opportunity

Don't miss out on the search

Here’s the thesis of this post: The search for non-human life and tech is the most undervalued enterprise in the world, and you're woefully underexposed.

Have you heard of Copernicus Space Corp.? They’re building the Swarm Architecture: multi-modal, self-replicating miniature satellites custom-designed for your space missions. A recent presser describes the company this way:

Copernicus Space Corporation (“Copernicus”) is a novel space exploration company leveraging deep knowledge of astrophysics, space systems engineering and synthetic biology to pioneer a unique space technology platform for distributed, intelligent in situ Swarm Exploration™. Copernicus develops and will deploy miniaturized, semiautonomous space probes with in situ detection capabilities for Swarm Exploration, in particular for the search for extant or extinct microbial life in our solar system, and later for exploring nearby exoplanets in our galaxy.

The team is stacked, with a nimble and experienced executive team and a decorated board and advisors.

Think for a moment if a private client contracts out a custom von Neumann probe mission. They devise a way to send these to a nearby star system in the space of some years, not centuries. Or they aim much closer to home, like the icy moons around Jupiter or Saturn. They make a discovery.

In a 2020 Scientific American article, Harvard’s Dr. Avi Loeb wrote about how the “‘gold rush’ opportunity of mining the sky for new technological ideas offers a financial incentive for becoming an observational astronomer.” Dr. Loeb leads Harvard’s Galileo Project, which studies unidentified objects in Earth’s atmosphere and interstellar objects. (Did you know there are postdoc positions at Harvard for studying…UFOs?)

We don’t normally think about the search for life as a commercial endeavor. It might elicit mixed feelings. Would injecting profit or commercialization muddy the waters of pure science? Do momentous findings belong behind the paywall of corporate products? Don’t such discoveries belong in the public domain?

These questions are all worth pondering. But the fact that such dilemmas exist should not preclude new entities engaging the search. There’s no reason the search should belong exclusively to legacy institutions like NASA and the SETI Institute, or to astrobiology and technosignature researchers. Or for that matter, to marginalized communities like UFO researchers. The fact that so few engage the search, that funding relies on modest government grants and a few philanthropists (or out of pocket money), and that the different research communities don’t get along (think: ufology vs. SETI), is a sign that we’re early. Very early.

NASA’s astrobiology program’s annual budget is around $65 million. There’s a single-family home on East 79th Street in Manhattan that just went on the market for $65 million. We’re so early.

Biotech companies should engage the search. What if just a handful of high-cap biotech firms devoted 1% of their budget to the search for non-human biologies?

In his book Astrobiology, Discovery, and Societal Impact, Steven J. Dick references Aaron Gronstal’s argument that the discovery of new terrestrial microbes "has had immense economic value" due applications in medicine and elsewhere. "He suggests the same may be true of the discovery of microbes beyond Earth."

If Apple devoted just 1% of their cash reverses to the search, they’d have almost $1.6 billion to play with.

At the last SALT conference in Manhattan, Dr. Garry Nolan’s presentation was titled “The Pentagon, Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and Crashed UFOs.” This was no UFO conference. “SALT is a global thought leadership and networking forum encompassing finance, technology and public policy.” As they put it: “Our global events connect leading asset managers and entrepreneurs with top asset owners and allocators, investment advisors and policy experts for networking, capital introduction and thought leadership.”

Dr. Nolan is no hobbyist. He’s the Rachford and Carlota A. Harris Professor in the Department of Pathology at Stanford University School of Medicine, has published over 330 research articles and holds 50 US patents as one of the top 25 inventors at Stanford University. He’s worked publicly to advance research into unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP)—the newest and more expansive acronym for UFOs. Stanford Magazine’s recent profile of his work is excellent. Nolan has spoken repeatedly of the hundreds of potential technology revolutions that await us from further study of UAP, one of the reasons for his intrepid public stance and fierce advocacy for inquiry.

Many want to see more institutional buy-in on the search for life, much more so for UAP, before they enter the fray. NASA’s independent UAP study team recently completed their report on promising data sources and study methods for UAP research. They appointed a new director of UAP research. Is that enough?

What about the fact that the Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, on June 14, released a draft amendment called the “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) Disclosure Act of 2023.” Fellow New York Senator Gillibrand is a co-sponsor, along with other notables. The 64 page bill speaks repeatedly of non-human intelligence, recovered craft, biological evidence, and much, much more. In a press release, Schumer said:

“For decades, many Americans have been fascinated by objects mysterious and unexplained and it’s long past time they get some answers. 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.”

This is the Senate Majority leader talking. This isn’t some hobby horse or stump speech snuck into a bill by a fringe element. This amendment has some serious teeth. It’s nothing short of what its title suggests: a plan to disclose this stuff to the public. As journalist Chris Sharp reported, “although fronting the new legislation, Senator Chuck Schumer’s staff and others in the Senate have been in coordination with various quarters of the U.S. government, including the White House and its National Security Council to create the language.” The term “non-human intelligence” appears 26 times in the amendment. Asked about this, bill co-sponsor Senator Mike Rounds said, “It was not by accident.”

Every discussion of this bill so far falls short of its contents. It really is remarkable. If the media have not given this ample attention (hint: they haven’t) they might be forgiven for the nearly impossible task of metabolizing it all.

Let’s wander into even weirder territory.

Here’s a passage I recently came across reading Dr. John Mack’s Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters. Mack was Harvard’s psychiatry department head at one point, a Pulitzer-prize winning author, and an overall distinguished, wise, kind-hearted thinker and clinician. He worked extensively with people who claimed intense encounters with non-human craft and intelligent lifeforms, which he said bore remarkable similarities across stable, well-adjusted people. This book is a terrific retrospective of his many years of work and countless hours listening and participating in these stories.

Here’s one passage that, when I read it, immediately struck a chord. That’s because it encapsulates so well the thesis behind Future Folklore.

Toward the end of a conference on the abduction phenomenon at MIT in June 1992, David Pritchard, cochair of the gathering, arranged to have several of his physicist colleagues from MIT and Harvard critique our work and present the findings of the Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program, which seeks to discover life in the cosmos by listening for patterned radio waves. Favoring a more holistic approach, I leaned forward in my chair and asked Philip Morrison, a distinguished MIT physicist whom I had known slightly from my anti-nuclear-weapons-activist days, why, given the uncertain nature of the problem, SETI was not using some form of altered state of consciousness as well as radio waves to discover and communicate with extraterrestrial beings. After all, consciousness may not be limited by the constraints of space/time that plague the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Morrison replied honestly that they were having enough trouble with their instruments as it was, and consciousness was so "messy." Another eminent MIT physics professor, Victor Weisskoff, once remarked to theologian Huston Smith, "We know there's more. We just don't know how to get at it."

Where should we search for non-human life, and how? Everywhere, every way. Even if an approach draws scorn or puzzled looks. As Mack points out, other intelligent life may not be limited in the ways we are. Elsewhere in Passport he quotes Terence McKenna: "To search expectantly for a radio signal from an extraterrestrial source is probably as culture-bound a presumption as to search the galaxy for a good Italian restaurant."

Don’t get me wrong: Let’s look for radio signals too. But our search needs a bias towards including more methods rather than preemptively ruling them out.

Future Folklore

That’s the approach at Future Folklore, where we’re incubating technologies that enable more searching: Onboarding people through affordable consumer tech, dreaming up more search methods to look in ways and domains we haven’t yet. We’re gearing up to advise companies on engaging the search in their own way. We want to onboard the whole world.

My wager for Future Folklore is that the search will begin to resemble a Ready Player One style global race to make findings. But here’s the cool thing about the search: Once you find something, you get to keep looking. The next discovery might be even more fascinating, puzzling, harrowing, or all of those things and more. Plus, there’s no way the discovering entity will make sense of the findings all on their own. It’s going to take everyone.

The search itself is a major innovation engine, stretching us to imagine exotic forms of life, communication, and discovery methods. But of course it’s the successful search that makes for the most explosive source of innovation. Imagine a civilization with an entirely different development trajectory, or one several orders of magnitude older than ours. There may be an entirely new offshoot of innovation required just to decipher what we find.

The collaboration by the German Space Agency and Center for Marine Environmental Sciences (MARUM) at the University of Bremen, on semi-autonomous mini-subs, is a good example of innovation preceding the search mission itself. Their inventions will enable nimble explorations of nearby icy moons. But their testing in Antarctic subglacial waters will shed light on these mysterious earthly ecosystems in the process. The engineering innovations needed to get this tech across the solar system will pay dividends to future missions too.

Here’s an idea: Let’s invent a gravity communication device to search for alien life in dark matter—gravity being a known force/medium common to dark and ordinary matter. Why not?

The list goes on.

NASA, Harvard, Stanford, the Pentagon, Congress… How many more institutions will it take to countenance the search for life in previously stigmatized domains? Jacques Vallée, the pioneering researcher of UFOs, a venture capitalist, and the inspiration behind Steven Spielberg’s French scientist in Close Encounters, recently said something to the effect that when it comes to UAP, "The millionaires are skeptical. The billionaires are not."

How many more leading indicators do we need?

Not to be forgotten, SETI research continues to evolve beyond radio astronomy. Researchers are searching in extremely narrow bands for periodic signals in the star/planet-dense core of the galaxy. What wonders. Let’s look everywhere.

My dream is to see researchers, inventors, and technologies surrounding non-human life—across the entire spectrum of possibilities from SETI to UAP and beyond—become the most sought after in the world due to the unparalleled upside of discovery after discovery after discovery.

I can’t think of a more thrilling quest—not even close. Ready?