First contact with aliens could easily end in genocide, scholars warn
SETI has been searching for evidence of alien life – but could doing so end in disaster?
William Lempert
Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Bowdoin College
William Lempert is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. He has conducted over two years of ethnographic fieldwork since 2006 in the Kimberley region of Northwestern Australia with Indigenous media organizations. Through collaboration on production teams, he aims to understand the stakes of Aboriginal self-representation embedded within the dynamic process of filmmaking. His research engages tensions between the production of films that vividly imagine hopeful and diverse Indigenous futures, and the broader defunding of Aboriginal communities and organizations. This ethnographic research informs his current work on how critical engagements with settler-colonial histories and Indigenous futurisms can help to reimagine the current era of outer space colonization.
