Post-Detection Toolkit

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The Toolkit is in its final edit stage. To take part in the process and 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: horizon scanning, identifying trends and uncertainties, constructing four contrasting pre-detection scenarios, and generating a set of randomly combined detection situations for use in workshops or simulations.

The toolkit provides 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 developed through a 15-month participatory futures process (2023–2025) that imagined alternatives for the SETI ecosystem in 2050 and explored discovery and its aftermath.

It is designed like a recipe book that makes futures thinking accessible through storytelling, roleplay, and collaborative exercises. The resource lists ingredients, and to come to life it relies on facilitators and participants. By adapting and combining the Toolkit elements in context, communities can explore varied futures after a SETI detection, and consider how they might feel, act, and respond in unfamiliar or unprecedented situations.

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.

A Commons Resource

As a commons resource, the Toolkit is an evolving effort that grows with participant engagement and input from diverse perspectives. Collective input makes it possible to grow an archive that welcomes plural narratives, fictions, and histories reaching well beyond UK, USA, and European contexts.

The strength of the archive lies in plurality. 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.

Not all pages are editable, but 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.

Please see the Contributing Guidelines before adding your work.

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 later in the year.

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).