Post-Detection Toolkit

The Toolkit guide .pdf is in its final edit stage. This resource will help guide contributions. If you would like more guidance about how to take part in the process at this point, or receive a notification when the Post-Detection Toolkit is open to edit, please send an email to: postdetectionhub@gmail.com. Addresses are kept private and are not added to any other lists.

What is the Post-Detection Toolkit?

The Post-Detection Toolkit is a flexible framework for exploring future discoveries, designed to handle uncertainty and highlight the significance of context, governance, and international collaboration. The toolkit uses a four-scenario method (from Dator's futures methods) to intentionally maximise difference between plausible futures. By enabling work with divergent possibilities, including those beyond current expectations, it helps build collective capacities for response across varied publics and disciplines.

The toolkit grows out of the collective research efforts of the Scenarios Working Group at the SETI Post-Detection Hub at the University of St Andrews, led by Dr. George Profitiliotis.

The work has involved extensive collaborative development across two phases to develop through a 15-month participatory futures process (2023–2025) that imagines various alternatives for the SETI ecosystem in 2050 and explores discovery and its aftermath.

The first phase used Miro for horizon scanning, identifying trends and uncertainties, and constructing four contrasting pre-detection scenarios. The second phase combined asynchronous work with activities during the inaugural Post-Detection Futures meeting (St Andrews, 2025), working to generate a set of detection situations that could be randomly combined for use in workshops or simulations.

A Recipe Book for SETI Futures

The toolkit is designed as a recipe book that makes futures thinking accessible through storytelling, role-play and collaborative exercises.

The fully developed toolkit will provide practical resources, including scenarios, templates, and interactive methods, as well as guidance on how to adapt and use them. The structured resource combines pre-detection scenarios and a growing archive of post-detection situations.

Contributions welcome

The 4 pre-detection scenarios have been designed across the last years, but the pre-detection scenarios are open to continuous contribution and strive for a diverse collection as possible.

As a commons resource, the Toolkit is an evolving effort that grows through participant engagement and welcomes plural scenarios and narratives beyond UK, USA and European contexts.

Anyone can contribute to the open sections, critique or adapt the materials. This is to support ongoing dialogue and that the resource remains robust and relevant across different communities. The post-detection situations archive is a living, open-ended resource, and contributors are invited to add to it, drawing on science fiction, notable SETI false alarms, or imagination.

Important note: The resource lists ingredients, but to come to life it needs and relies on the improvisation of facilitators and participants. We are grateful for all contributions that can enrich the variety of the post-detection situations. To use the Toolkit elements, they need to be adapted and combined with specific contexts through group work. This process is done in groups: communities bring their own contexts to the exploration of varied futures of technosignature detection, and consider how they might feel, act, and respond in unfamiliar or unprecedented situations. The improvisatory process is human work that can't be done alone or automated.

How to Use The Post-Detection Toolkit

• Explore pre-detection scenarios and post-detection situations, resources, and methods.
• Contribute new detection situations to grow the archive and introduce greater variety.
• Remix the Toolkit through digital or analogue means, adapting scenarios into games, tools, or experiences that enable communities to explore post-detection together.

Public Outreach

For the wider public, the Toolkit serves as an accessible and creative way to understand possible futures in the context of scenarios of discovery in 2050.

• A Tool for Dialogue and Participation: Participants consider the ethical, social, and emotional dimensions of possible futures together, and discuss what values and actions might matter most in those contexts. The goal is to include communities in policy questions and issues, for futures shaped by diverse perspectives, not just experts.

• Transform to Engage: The work is offered to the research community for adaptation. Members of the Hub are working on translating the Toolkit into different formats, including an AI tool in a "choose your own adventure" type of narrative game, and a more analogue collective role-play workshop. The Toolkit has been used in workshops, public events, and community activities in Scotland, the USA, New Zealand, and Georgia, with upcoming sessions in Australia.

Note: The first edition of the Post-Detection Toolkit was trialled in summer workshops. An updated version will be published here on the Wiki after it is formally released at the 77th International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Antalya, Türkiye, from 5 to 9 October 2026.

For Reference:

• Elliott et al. (2023). The SETI Post-Detection Hub: Preparing for Discovery. IAC-23,A4,2,2,x79324.
• Genevieve et al. (2024). Plurality in Post Detection Scenarios. 53rd International Astronautical Congress, Italy.
• Profitiliotis et al. (2025). SETI Post-Detection Toolkit 2050. (Upcoming).