Futures Workshop | George Profitiliotis | IAUS404

Futures Workshop Presented by George Profitiliotis Netherlands Institute of Ecology / Blue Marble Space Institute of Science A workshop delivered at IAU Symposium 404: Advancing the Search for Technosignatures | 2–6 March 2026 ABSTRACT: The scientific community of SETI operates under conditions of radical uncertainty vis-à-vis its object of research. This is a challenge shared with the scientific community of space sustainability with which it has conceptual interconnections that underpin interesting parallels between the long-term sustainability of extraterrestrial technospheres and of Earth’s technosphere. Under such conditions of radical uncertainty, scientists utilize socially-shared narratives to enable sense-making, decision-making, and action-generation at the collective level and achieve the conviction of others towards particular research directions. Such narratives in both fields share tacitly the same four metanarrative framings of descriptive and normative anthropocentrism and non-anthropocentrism. Naturally, the three metanarrative framings that are underpinned by at least one of the above two types of anthropocentrism are more easily accessible conceptually and are thus more likely to be implicitly or explicitly deployed by scientists in their imaginings of extraterrestrial technospheres or Earth’s technosphere. This leaves the fourth metanarrative framing of descriptive and normative non-anthropocentrism underutilized, despite its potential fruitful contribution to theorization in both cases. Addressing this shortcoming requires interventions that target the intuitive theories and their embedded folk concepts possessed by scientists--in parallel to their formal theories--which can become operative in practice regardless of conscious intent. KEYWORDS: futures literacy; narratives; radical uncertainty; technospheres Presented 2–6 March during Advancing the Search for Technosignatures, an online symposium from the International Astronomical Union (IAU; https://www.iau.org/) and Blue Marble Space Institute of Science (BMSIS; https://bmsis.org/).