We’re only halfway through 2023, and it feels already like the year of alien contact.
In February, President Joe Biden gave orders to shoot down three unidentified aerial phenomena – NASA’s title for UFOs. Then, the alleged leaked footage from a Navy pilot of a UFO, and then news of a whistleblower’s report on a possible U.S. government cover-up about UFO research. Most recently, an independent analysis published in June suggests that UFOs might have been collected by a clandestine agency of the U.S. government.
If any actual evidence of extraterrestrial life emerges, whether from whistleblower testimony or an admission of a cover-up, humans would face a historic paradigm shift.
As members of an Indigenous studies working group who were asked to lend our disciplinary expertise to a workshop affiliated with the Berkeley SETI Research Center, we have studied centuries of culture contacts and their outcomes from around the globe. Our collaborative preparations for the workshop drew from transdisciplinary research in Australia, New Zealand, Africa and across the Americas.
In its final form, our group statement illustrated the need for diverse perspectives on the ethics of listening for alien life and a broadening of what defines “intelligence” and “life.” Based on our findings, we consider first contact less as an event and more as a long process that has already begun.
Who’s in charge of first contact
The question of who is “in charge” of preparing for contact with alien life immediately comes to mind. The communities – and their interpretive lenses – most likely to engage in any contact scenario would be military, corporate and scientific.
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By giving Americans the legal right to profit from space tourism and planetary resource extraction, the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015 could mean that corporations will be the first to find signs of extraterrestrial societies. Otherwise, while detecting unidentified aerial phenomena is usually a military matter, and NASA takes the lead on sending messages from Earth, most activities around extraterrestrial communications and evidence fall to a program called SETI, or the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
SETI investigators are virtually always STEM – science, technology, engineering and math – scholars. Few in the social science and humanities fields have been afforded opportunities to contribute to concepts of and preparations for 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.
Ethics of listening
Neither Breakthough Listen nor SETI’s site features a current statement of ethics beyond a commitment to transparency. Our working group was not the first to raise this issue. And while the SETI Institute and certain research centers have included ethics in their event programming, it seems relevant to ask who NASA and SETI answer to, and what ethical guidelines they’re following for a potential first contact scenario.
SETI’s Post-Detection Hub – another rare exception to SETI’s STEM-centrism – seems the most likely to develop a range of contact scenarios. The possible circumstances imagined include finding ET artifacts, detecting signals from thousands of light years away, dealing with linguistic incompatibility, finding microbial organisms in space or on other planets, and biological contamination of either their or our species. Whether the U.S. government or heads of military would heed these scenarios is another matter.
SETI-affiliated scholars tend to reassure critics that the intentions of those listening for technosignatures are benevolent, since “what harm could come from simply listening?” The chair emeritus of SETI Research, Jill Tarter, defended listening because any ET civilization would perceive our listening techniques as immature or elementary.
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But our working group drew upon the history of colonial contacts to show the dangers of thinking that whole civilizations are comparatively advanced or intelligent. For example, when Christopher Columbus and other European explorers came to the Americas, those relationships were shaped by the preconceived notion that the “Indians” were less advanced due to their lack of writing. This led to decades of Indigenous servitude in the Americas.
This 16th century engraving shows Christopher Columbus landing in the Americas, where he and his explorers deemed the Indigenous people there as ‘primitive,’ as they had no writing system. Theodor de Bry/Wikimedia Commons
The working group statement also suggested that the act of listening is itself already within a “phase of contact.” Like colonialism itself, contact might best be thought of as a series of events that starts with planning, rather than a singular event. Seen this way, isn’t listening potentially without permission just another form of surveillance? To listen intently but indiscriminately seemed to our working group like a type of eavesdropping.
It seems contradictory that we begin our relations with aliens by listening in without their permission while actively working to stop other countries from listening to certain U.S. communications. If humans are initially perceived as disrespectful or careless, ET contact could more likely lead to their colonization of us.
Histories of contact
Throughout histories of Western colonization, even in those few cases when contactees were intended to be protected, contact has led to brutal violence, pandemics, enslavement and genocide.
James Cook’s 1768 voyage on the HMS Endeavor was initiated by the Royal Society. This prestigious British academic society charged him with calculating the solar distance between the Earth and the Sun by measuring the visible movement of Venus across the Sun from Tahiti. The society strictly forbade him from any colonial engagements.
Though he achieved his scientific goals, Cook also received orders from the Crown to map and claim as much territory as possible on the return voyage. Cook’s actions put into motion wide-scale colonization and Indigenous dispossession across Oceania, including the violent conquests of Australia and New Zealand.
The Royal Society gave Cook a “prime directive” of doing no harm and to only conduct research that would broadly benefit humanity. However, explorers are rarely independent from their funders, and their explorations reflect the political contexts of their time.
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.
Although separated by vast time and space, both Cook’s voyage and SETI share key qualities, including their appeal to celestial science in the service of all humanity. They also share a mismatch between their ethical protocols and the likely long-term impacts of their success. https://www.youtube.com/embed/5gZwLGrJQrM?wmode=transparent&start=0 This BBC video describes the modern ramifications of Captain James Cook’s colonial legacy in New Zealand.
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The initial domino of a public ET message, or recovered bodies or ships, could initiate cascading events, including military actions, corporate resource mining and perhaps even geopolitical reorganizing. The history of imperialism and colonialism on Earth illustrates that not everyone benefits from colonization. No one can know for sure how engagement with extraterrestrials would go, though it’s better to consider cautionary tales from Earth’s own history sooner rather than later.
This article has been updated to correct the date of James Cook’s voyage.
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Black holes, like the one in this illustration, can spray powerful jets.
S. Dagnello (NRAO/AUI/NSF), CC BY-SADavid Garofalo, Kennesaw State University
One of the most powerful objects in the universe is a radio quasar – a spinning black hole spraying out highly energetic particles. Come too close to one, and you’d get sucked in by its gravitational pull, or burn up from the intense heat surrounding it. But ironically, studying black holes and their jets can give researchers insight into where potentially habitable worlds might be in the universe.
As an astrophysicist, I’ve spent two decades modeling how black holes spin, how that creates jets, and how they affect the environment of space around them.
What are black holes?
Black holes are massive, astrophysical objects that use gravity to pull surrounding objects into them. Active black holes have a pancake-shaped structure around them called an accretion disk, which contains hot, electrically charged gas.
The plasma that makes up the accretion disk comes from farther out in the galaxy. When two galaxies collide and merge, gas is funneled into the central region of that merger. Some of that gas ends up getting close to the newly merged black hole and forms the accretion disk.
There is one supermassive black holeat the heart of every massive galaxy.
Black holes and their disks can rotate, and when they do, they drag space and time with them – a concept that’s mind-boggling and very hard to grasp conceptually. But black holes are important to study because they produce enormous amounts of energy that can influence galaxies.
How energetic a black hole is depends on different factors, such as the mass of the black hole, whether it rotates rapidly, and whether lots of material falls onto it. Mergers fuel the most energetic black holes, but not all black holes are fed by gas from a merger. In spiral galaxies, for example, less gas tends to fall into the center, and the central black hole tends to have less energy.
One of the ways they generate energy is through what scientists call “jets” of highly energetic particles. A black hole can pull in magnetic fields and energetic particles surrounding it, and then as the black hole rotates, the magnetic fields twist into a jet that sprays out highly energetic particles.
Magnetic fields twist around the black hole as it rotates to store energy – kind of like when you pull and twist a rubber band. When you release the rubber band, it snaps forward. Similarly, the magnetic fields release their energy by producing these jets.
The accretion disk around a black hole can form a jet of hot, energetic particles surrounded by magnetic field lines.NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI), CC BY
These jets can speed up or suppress the formation of stars in a galaxy, depending on how the energy is released into the black hole’s host galaxy.
Rotating black holes
Some black holes, however, rotate in a different direction than the accretion disk around them. This phenomenon is called counterrotation, and some studies my colleagues and I have conducted suggest that it’s a key feature governing the behavior of one of the most powerful kinds of objects in the universe: the radio quasar.
Radio quasars are the subclass of black holes that produce the most powerful energy and jets.
You can imagine the black hole as a rotating sphere, and the accretion disk as a disk with a hole in the center. The black hole sits in that center hole and rotates one way, while the accretion disk rotates the other way.
This counterrotation forces the black hole to spin down and eventually up again in the other direction, called corotation. Imagine a basketball that spins one way, but you keep tapping it to rotate in the other. The tapping will spin the basketball down. If you continue to tap in the opposite direction, it will eventually spin up and rotate in the other direction. The accretion disk does the same thing.
Since the jets tap into the black hole’s rotational energy, they are powerful only when the black hole is spinning rapidly. The change from counterrotation to corotation takes at least 100 million years. Many initially counterrotating black holes take billions of years to become rapidly spinning corotating black holes.
So, these black holes would produce powerful jets both early and later in their lifetimes, with an interlude in the middle where the jets are either weak or nonexistent.
When the black hole spins in counterrotation with respect to its accretion disk, that motion produces strong jets that push molecules in the surrounding gas close together, which leads to the formation of stars.
But later, in corotation, the jet tilts. This tilt makes it so that the jet impinges directly on the gas, heating it up and inhibiting star formation. In addition to that, the jet also sprays X-rays across the galaxy. Cosmic X-rays are bad for life because they can harm organic tissue.
For life to thrive, it most likely needs a planet with a habitable ecosystem, and clouds of hot gas saturated with X-rays don’t contain such planets. So, astronomers can instead look for galaxies without a tilted jet coming from its black hole. This idea is key to understanding where intelligence could potentially have emerged and matured in the universe.
Black holes as a guide
By early 2022, I had built a black hole model to use as a guide. It could point out environments with the right kind of black holes to produce the greatest number of planets without spraying them with X-rays. Life in such environments could emerge to its full potential.
Looking at black holes and their role in star formation could help scientists predict when and where life was most likely to form.
Where are such conditions present? The answer is low-density environments where galaxies had merged about 11 billion years ago.
These environments had black holes whose powerful jets enhanced the rate of star formation, but they never experienced a bout of tilted jets in corotation. In short, my model suggested that theoretically, the most advanced extraterrestrial civilization would have likely emerged on the cosmic scene far away and billions of years ago.
David Garofalo, Professor of Physics, Kennesaw State University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Kelsey Juliana, a lead plaintiff in a federal lawsuit over responsibility for climate change, speaks at a 2019 rally in Oregon.
AP Photo/Steve DipaolaHannah Wiseman, Penn State
The U.S. Supreme Court in March 2025 ended a decade-old lawsuit filed by a group of children who sought to hold the federal government responsible for some of the consequences of climate change. But just two months earlier, the justices allowed a similar suit from the city and county of Honolulu, Hawaii, to continue against oil and gas companies.
Evidence shows that fossil fuel companies, electric utilities and the federal government have known about climate change, its dangers and its human causes for at least 50 years. But the steps taken by fossil fuel companies, utilities and governments, including the U.S. government, have not been enough to meet international climate targets.
So local and state governments and citizens have asked the courts to force companies and public agencies to act. Their results have varied, with limited victories to date. But the cases keep coming.
In response to this federal executive seesaw of climate action, some legal claims use a court-based, or common law, approach to address climate concerns. For instance, in Connecticut v. American Electric Power, filed in 2004, nine states asked a federal judge to order power plants to reduce their emissions. The states said those emissions contributed to global warming, which they argued met the federal common law definition of a “public nuisance.”
That case ended when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2011 that the existence of a statute – the federal Clean Air Act – meant common law did not apply. Other plaintiffs have tried to use the “public nuisance” claim or a related common-law claim of “trespass” to force large power plants or oil and gas producers to pay climate-related damages. But in those cases, too, courts found that the Clean Air Act overrode the common-law grounds for those claims.
With those case outcomes, many plaintiffs have shifted their strategies, focusing more on state courts and seeking to hold the fossil fuel industry responsible for allegedly deceiving the public about the causes and effects of climate change.
Three examples of petroleum industry advertisements a lawsuit alleges are misleading about the causes of climate change.State of Maine v. BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, Sunoco and American Petroleum Insititute
Examining deception
In many cases, state and local governments are arguing that the fossil fuel industry knew about the dangers of climate change and deceived the public about them, and that the industry exaggerated the extent of its investments in energy that doesn’t emit carbon.
Rather than directly asking courts to order reduced carbon emissions, these cases tend to seek damages that will help governments cover the costs associated with climate change, such as construction of cooling centers
and repair of roads damaged by increased precipitation.
In legal terms, the lawsuits are saying oil and gas companies violated consumer-protection laws and committed common-law civil violations such as negligence. For instance, the city of Chicago alleges that major petroleum giants – along with the industry trade association the American Petroleum Institute – had “abundant knowledge” of the public harms of fossil fuels yet “actively campaigned” to hide that information and deceive consumers. Many other complaints by states and local governments make similar allegations.
Another lawsuit, from the state of Maine, lists and provides photographs of a litany of internal industry documents showing industry knowledge of the threat of climate change. That lawsuit also cites a 1977 memo from an Exxon employee to Exxon executives, which stated that “current scientific opinion overwhelmingly favors attributing atmospheric carbon dioxide increase to fossil fuel consumption,” and a 1979 internal Exxon memo about the buildup of carbon dioxide emissions, which warned that “(t)he potential problem is great and urgent.”
These complaints also show organizations supported by fossil fuel companies published ads as far back as the 1990s, with titles such as “Apocalypse No” and “Who told you the earth was warming … Chicken Little?” Some of these ads – part of a broader campaign – were funded by a group called the Information Council for the Environment, supported by coal producers and electric utilities.
Courts have dismissed some of these complaints, finding that federal laws overrule the principles those suits are based on. But many are still winding their way through the courts.
In 2023 the Supreme Court of Hawaii found that federal laws do not prevent climate claims based on state common law. In January 2025 the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the case to continue.
Lead claimant Rikki Held, then 22, confers with lawyers before the beginning of a 2023 Montana trial about young people’s rights in a time of climate change.William Campbell/Getty Images
Other approaches
Still other litigation approaches argue that governments inadequately reviewed the effects of greenhouse gas emissions, or even supported or subsidized those emissions caused by private industry. Those lawsuits – some of which were filed by children, with help from their parents or legal guardians – claim the governments’ actions violated people’s constitutional rights.
For instance, children in the Juliana v. United States case, first filed in 2015, said 50 years of petroleum-supporting actions by presidents and various federal agencies had violated their fundamental “right to a climate system capable of sustaining human life.” The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that their claim was a “political question” – meant for Congress, not the courts. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to reconsider that ruling in March 2025.
But children in Montana found more success. The Montana Constitution requires state officials and all residents to “maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment … for present and future generations.” In 2024 the Montana Supreme Court determined that this provision “includes a stable climate system that sustains human lives and liberties.”
The Montana Supreme Court also reviewed a state law banning officials from considering greenhouse gas emissions of projects approved by the state. The court found that the ban violated the state constitution, too. Since then, the Montana Supreme Court has specifically required state officials to review the climate effects of a project for which permits were challenged.
Concerned people and groups continue to file climate-related lawsuits across the country and around the world. They are seeing mixed results, but as the cases continue and more are filed, they are drawing attention to potential corporate and government wrongdoing, as well as the human costs of climate change. And they are inspiring shareholders and citizens to demand more accurate information and action from fossil fuel companies and electric utilities.Hannah Wiseman, Professor of Law, Penn State
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
AI-generated images can exploit how your mind works − here’s why they fool you and how to spot them
Arryn Robbins discusses the challenges of recognizing AI-generated images due to human cognitive limitations and inattentional blindness, emphasizing the importance of critical thinking in a visually fast-paced online environment.
I’m more of a scroller than a poster on social media. Like many people, I wind down at the end of the day with a scroll binge, taking in videos of Italian grandmothers making pasta or baby pygmy hippos frolicking.
For a while, my feed was filled with immaculately designed tiny homes, fueling my desire for a minimalist paradise. Then, I started seeing AI-generated images; many contained obvious errors, such as staircases to nowhere or sinks within sinks. Yet, commenters rarely pointed them out, instead admiring the aesthetic.
These images were clearly AI-generated and didn’t depict reality. Did people just not notice? Not care?
As a cognitive psychologist, I’d guess “yes” and “yes.” My expertise is in how people process and use visual information. I primarily investigate how people look for objects and information visually, from the mundane searches of daily life, such as trying to find a dropped earring, to more critical searches, like those conducted by radiologists or search-and-rescue teams.
With my understanding of how people process images and notice − or don’t notice − detail, it’s not surprising to me that people aren’t tuning in to the fact that many images are AI-generated.
We’ve been here before
The struggle to detect AI-generated images mirrors past detection challenges such as spotting photoshopped images or computer-generated images in movies.
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But there’s a key difference: Photo editing and CGI require intentional design by artists, while AI images are generated by algorithms trained on datasets, often without human oversight. The lack of oversight can lead to imperfections or inconsistencies that can feel unnatural, such as the unrealistic physics or lack of consistency between frames that characterize what’s sometimes called “AI slop.”
Despite these differences, studies show people struggle to distinguish real images from synthetic ones, regardless of origin. Even when explicitly asked to identify images as real, synthetic or AI-generated, accuracy hovers near the level of chance, meaning people did only a little better than if they’d just guessed.
In everyday interactions, where you aren’t actively scrutinizing images, your ability to detect synthetic content might even be weaker.
Attention shapes what you see, what you miss
Spotting errors in AI images requires noticing small details, but the human visual system isn’t wired for that when you’re casually scrolling. Instead, while online, people take in the gist of what they’re viewing and can overlook subtle inconsistencies.
Visual attention operates like a zoom lens: You scan broadly to get an overview of your environment or phone screen, but fine details require focused effort. Human perceptual systems evolved to quickly assess environments for any threats to survival, with sensitivity to sudden changes − such as a quick-moving predator − sacrificing precision for speed of detection.
This speed-accuracy trade-off allows for rapid, efficient processing, which helped early humans survive in natural settings. But it’s a mismatch with modern tasks such as scrolling through devices, where small mistakes or unusual details in AI-generated images can easily go unnoticed.
People also miss things they aren’t actively paying attention to or looking for. Psychologists call this inattentional blindness: Focusing on one task causes you to overlook other details, even obvious ones. In the famous invisible gorilla study, participants asked to count basketball passes in a video failed to notice someone in a gorilla suit walking through the middle of the scene.
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If you’re counting how many passes the people in white make, do you even notice someone walk through in a gorilla suit?
Similarly, when your focus is on the broader content of an AI image, such as a cozy tiny home, you’re less likely to notice subtle distortions. In a way, the sixth finger in an AI image is today’s invisible gorilla − hiding in plain sight because you’re not looking for it.
Efficiency over accuracy in thinking
Our cognitive limitations go beyond visual perception. Human thinking uses two types of processing: fast, intuitive thinking based on mental shortcuts, and slower, analytical thinking that requires effort. When scrolling, our fast system likely dominates, leading us to accept images at face value.
Adding to this issue is the tendency to seek information that confirms your beliefs or reject information that goes against them. This means AI-generated images are more likely to slip by you when they align with your expectations or worldviews. If an AI-generated image of a basketball player making an impossible shot jibes with a fan’s excitement, they might accept it, even if something feels exaggerated.
While not a big deal for tiny home aesthetics, these issues become concerning when AI-generated images may be used to influence public opinion. For example, research shows that people tend to assume images are relevant to accompanying text. Even when the images provide no actual evidence, they make people more likely to accept the text’s claims as true.
Misleading real or generated images can make false claims seem more believable and even cause people to misremember real events. AI-generated images have the power to shape opinions and spread misinformation in ways that are difficult to counter.
Trust your gut. If something feels off, it probably is. Your brain expertly recognizes objects and faces, even under varying conditions. Perhaps you’ve experienced what psychologists call the uncanny valley and felt unease with certain humanoid faces. This experience shows people can detect anomalies, even when they can’t fully explain what’s wrong.
Scan for clues. AI struggles with certain elements: hands, text, reflections, lighting inconsistencies and unnatural textures. If an image seems suspicious, take a closer look.
Think critically. Sometimes, AI generates photorealistic images with impossible scenarios. If you see a political figure casually surprising baristas or a celebrity eating concrete, ask yourself: Does this make sense? If not, it’s probably fake.
Check the source. Is the poster a real person? Reverse image search can help trace a picture’s origin. If the metadata is missing, it might be generated by AI.
AI-generated images are becoming harder to spot. During scrolling, the brain processes visuals quickly, not critically, making it easy to miss details that reveal a fake. As technology advances, slow down, look closer and think critically.
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