Over the Easter break, I read your wonderful book, The Mind’s Sky: Human Intelligence in a Cosmic Context. Like you and many others, I am fascinated with the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). It rests at that wonderful boundary between science and science fiction — inviting educated, cross-disciplinary guesses at the deep unknown. But as you’ve noted, SETI is a little more than that. To understand what’s out there, we must first understand ourselves. And despite all the scientific progress we’ve made over the last few centuries, our knowledge of life and intelligence remains confined to a planetary sample size of one (it’s a remarkable sample nonetheless). I also enjoyed the parallels you drew between ET intelligence with that of life on Earth. The chapter, “A Dog’s Life”, really got me thinking. If you recall, you noted that “there is something chilling about the way dogs so readily abdicated their sovereignty” to their human masters. In their new cooperatives, “dogs [lost] something essential in the bargain”. (We can extend this haunting observation to other domesticated animals as well. Since the age of agriculture and industrialization, chickens have lived especially miserable lives.) In the context of SETI, you ask us then if we would “care to lead a dog’s life”? That is, should we risk opening Pandora’s box knowing full well that if we did discover intelligent life, there is some chance that their intelligence, capability, and ambitions far exceed our own? Noting also that with that chance, we might accidentally reveal our feeble position in the cosmos to them. And if they’re of the overlord sort, we might be putting our own planetary sovereignty and survival in jeopardy. You suggest that most of us would probably reject the life of the dog. After all, “we’re used to being top dogs” on Earth. “To abrogate our independence would leave us barely human”. This is reminiscent of The House Dog and the Wolf in Aesop’s Fables. In the fable, the House Dog is talking to the hungry Wolf about the spoils and exploits of his wonderful life. He encourages the Wolf to join him in his lavish lifestyle. But upon seeing the red collar on the Dog’s neck, the Wolf runs away in fear of its ultimate meaning. True, most of us probably don’t want to live like a domesticated dog. But we are a lot more malleable than we like to believe. History and contemporary culture shows us the many ways in which people come together to write and rewrite their shared fictions. From religions to cults, or ideologies to corporations, we are capable of believing and rationalizing all sorts of things. In my view, Sapiens have as much in common with Aesop’s House Dog as it does with The Wolf. Even if we do not want to be a dog, would we even know it? All it takes is a little nudging of our institutions and accumulated knowledge in some direction. (Many science fiction authors have played with this idea. Arthur Clarke’s Childhood’s End is a particular favorite of mine. The alien overlords in his book are busy guiding and corralling humanity over many generations for reasons which I will not spoil. ) So given the tail-end risks, should we limit SETI only to observations of the cosmos? Should we refrain from open-ended communications with the unknown for fear of potential subjugation? Maybe. This is just a hunch, however, from one naïve, risk-averse human that is speculating on one particular sort of ETI that may or may not materialize. But I do wonder, Tim, if your thoughts on SETI and the matter have changed since writing your book thirty years ago? I sometimes wish that I could live forever to see all the marvellous things that people will someday build, learn and discover. But I'm also wary of humanity's latent potential for dysfunction and destruction. Time does interesting things to likelihoods. So I'm not sure if I would like to live until then. Warm regards, Tobias