2025 Theses Doctoral

The Evidence of Things Not Seen: Searching for Extraterrestrial Intelligence in an Enchanted Universe

Martini, Connor Joseph

This dissertation examines the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) as a site where scientific practice contributes to the enchantment of the universe through material and discursive processes that sustain openness to unknowable others. Rather than treating science and religion as exclusive frameworks for being in the world, this study argues that SETI practitioners engage in forms of religious work—mediating presence and absence, cultivating openness to transcendent figures, and managing radical uncertainty. The central problem addressed is how enchantment operates within ostensibly secular scientific spaces, challenging conventional narratives of disenchantment that position science as inherently opposed to mystery, wonder, and non-human agency.

Using ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and textual analysis conducted between 2022 and 2024, this study traces how SETI researchers create what I term infrastructural and promissory enchantment. Ethnographic observations included participation in weekly research meetings, conferences, and observatory visits, supplemented by interviews with practitioners across major SETI institutions. Archival work at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory examined documents from SETI’s Cold War origins through the 1990s, while textual analysis explored peer-reviewed publications and public communications about extraterrestrial contact scenarios.

The dissertation concludes that SETI practitioners enact what I term ‘pre-enchantment’ through two primary modes: infrastructural practices that create material conditions for alien presence to become detectable (radio observatories, signal processing algorithms, institutional collaborations), and promissory practices that orient this infrastructure toward possible futures through narratives of imagined contact scenarios and experimental design. These practices do not simply await alien signals but actively constitute the conditions under which such signals might emerge as meaningful presences.

Rather than representing a re-enchantment that recovers pre-modern forms of mystery, SETI demonstrates how pre-enchantment emerges through scientific practice itself—creating effects of living in a universe populated by potential presences while remaining within naturalistic frameworks. This enchantment is neither transcendent revelation nor secular wonder, but an ongoing material and temporal arrangement that holds open possibilities for encounter with radical otherness.