The 2021 Assembly of the Order of the Octopus

The conference has now passed, but anyone interested may find many of the talks and posters on our Zenodo community, as well as on ADS.

The Purpose of the Conference

The 2021 Assembly of the Order of the Octopus is a virtual conference for early-career researchers who work in, or would like to begin working in, the field of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), also known as the search for technosignatures. The field experienced a dearth of funding from the 1990s into the early 2000s, but the rise of astrobiology and exoplanetary astronomy, as well as an influx of private funding, have renewed interest in the last five years or so. 

However, that funding gap has led to a resulting career gap in the technosigantures field: there are many up-and-coming protostars in SETI, but very few postdocs or beginning faculty mentors to help lead them professionally through the field. In addition, a lot of these early-career researchers are scattered across different universities and disciplines, and find it hard to find and connect with each other.

With that context, we are holding this conference to provide networking and community-building for early-career folks in SETI. We hope that it will provide a venue for participants to present talks and posters, perhaps even their first talks and posters, in a safe and supportive environment. 

In designing the program for this conference, we are also striving to incorporate principles of inclusivity and interdisciplinarity, and to instill these values into the community from the ground up. 

We also know that many undergraduate students, especially those from smaller colleges and community colleges, may not have had the opportunity to participate in SETI, even though they are very interested in doing so. We hope to provide resources and broadcast opportunities for those looking to engage with the field for the first time.

Finally, this conference is being hosted by the Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center (PSETI Center). We hope that this will be a wonderful event with which to introduce the PSETI center to the larger technosignatures community!

Wait, wasn’t this conference called “Assembly of the Order of the Dolphin” before? Why did it change to “Assembly of the Order of the Octopus”?

When we started organizing this conference, we used “Order of the Dolphin” as the name of the group of participants and Assembly of the Order of the Dolphin (AOD) as the conference name. This name has deep roots in SETI history: at the first SETI conference at Green Bank, West Virginia, the members were enthralled by John Lilly’s presentation about the potential for understanding extraterrestrial languages through studying dolphin communication. That enthusiasm led to themselves jokingly calling themselves the “Order of the Dolphin” and referring to each other as “Fellow Dolphin” in correspondence. The quirkiness of the name and its connection to the history of SETI research led us to adopt the name for this event. However, we learned that the inspiration for the original Order of the Dolphin, John Lilly, was later revealed to be involved in unethical and misleading scientific practices and dolphin abuse (more on that history here and here). 

We decided that we did not want to keep using a name with so much harm attached to it. But at the same time, we wanted to retain the camaraderie and wonder for non-human intelligences that the original name meant to us. For these reasons, we have renamed ourselves The Order of the Octopus, reclaiming the original structure, but divorcing ourselves from the dark history of the original name. In fact, we would argue that octopi are a) better models for the sorts of non-human intelligences we might expect to find beyond Earth, as they share less of their evolutionary history with humans b) just as fascinating as dolphins from an animal cognition perspective, as they display extensive tool use and problem-solving abilities c) extremely cool!