Hostility toward outsiders reached a breaking point this year in the United States, with the Donald Trump administration seeking to bar entry to people from predominantly Muslim countries, and threatening to severely curtail the number of refugees the country shelters from conflicts and crises around the globe. Similar tensions have played out elsewhere too, as more countries close their doors to refugees, and the U.K. prepares to separate from the European Union under the leadership of an isolationist administration.
If our planet is this inhospitable to its own inhabitants, says the experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats, just think about the message we must be sending to extraterrestrial life.
Various theories have abounded to try to solve the paradox–one, put forth by Stephen Hawking, supposes that other civilizations haven’t advertised their presence because to do so would put them at risk for attack. Keats thinks otherwise. “To me, this is really more a reflection on our own society,” Keats tells Fast Company. “That is to say, if I were an alien, I wouldn’t feel all that welcome here.”
“Welcome mats are the universal technology for extending a sense of welcome,” Keats says. They’re a departure from the scant other attempts to send a message to extraterrestrial life, which, like the Voyager Golden Records, were meant to communicate the essence of humankind and life on Earth. They were not, Keats says, an invitation, which is what he’s aiming for. But to ensure that a sense of openness and belonging could be conveyed to life forms whose language and customs and physicality are entirely unknown, Keats had to abandon our cultural iconography and devise a more universal message. “A true universality is probably unattainable,” Keats says, “but you can approach it.”
On the mats, the point of entry into Earth’s atmosphere is depicted as a sky-blue shape that mirrors the red blob, and the background gradates from a similar sky-blue to violet, to symbolizes the blob’s journey from the atmosphere to the interior of the building where the mat is housed. The border of the mat is black, to evoke the space the alien traveled through.
Keats eventually hopes to install mats at other significant junctures, like the International Space Station and the entrance to the United Nations in New York City; a version of the map will also be on display at the STATE Festival in Los Angeles in October, which focuses on the intersection of science, technology, and culture. But he also has begun to visualize a world in which one of these mats exists in front of every door, as a force against the xenophobia developing within humanity. The mats’ abstract designs, he says, acknowledge the limits of our ability to communicate adequately with each other, and reinforce a sense of hospitality and welcome that, even if we feel we are offering, does not always come clearly across. “Essentially, we’re all aliens, and we’re all alienating each other,” Keats says. “This can be a message to overcome that.”