Post-Detection Toolkit

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What is the Post-Detection Toolkit?

The Post-Detection Scenario 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 scenarios 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.

A Commons Resource

As a living commons, the toolkit welcomes contributions from multiple contexts. Not all pages are editable, but anyone can contribute to the open sections, critique, or adapt the materials. This is in the support of ongoing dialogue and ensures the resource remains robust and relevant across different communities.

The post-detection scenarios archive is a living, open-ended resource. The strength of the archive lies in plurality and contributors are invited to add new scenarios, drawing on science fiction, history, or imagination.

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 so that futures are shaped by diverse perspectives, not just experts.

• Designed to Engage: The Toolkit is approachable and used in workshops, public events, and community activities to invite broad participation in futures thinking about post-detection. It can be creatively adapted to different contexts, and the resource grows through participant engagement and input from transcultural contexts. So far, workshops have been held in Scotland, the USA, New Zealand, and Georgia, and are planned in Australia.

How to Use The Post-Detection Toolkit

• Explore existing pre- and post-detection scenarios, resources, and methods.
• Contribute new scenarios, tools, or reflections to expand the commons archive and strengthen collective readiness for discovery.
• Remix the toolkit through art projects, games, Live Action Role Play (LARP), or performance: adapting and repurposing scenarios so communities can explore post-detection.

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).