Culture in the Cosmos As SETI's scientists plan for their first
contact with other worlds, who better to consult with than
anthropologists, who specialize in encounters with exotic
cultures? And thus, over the past several years the SETI
Institute has repeatedly brought together anthropologists and
scholars from other disciplines, in an attempt to bridge the gap
between humans and extraterrestrials. The task of these savants,
who met most recently in San Jose, California, is twofold: to
try to uncover any universals of culture, and then apply these
insights to constructing messages that might be intelligible to
independently evolved civilizations. "Although it is impossible
to predict the nature of extraterrestrial intelligence,"
admitted NASA's Chief Historian, Steven Dick, "the one certainty
is that, if it exists, it will have undergone cultural
evolution." For SETI researchers, the dizzying variety of
societies that might evolve on other worlds becomes manageable
for one simple reason: if extraterrestrials