Scientific Divination: Prediction, Enchantment, and the SETI Future

This paper examines how SETI practitioners use game theory, historical analogy, and policy protocols to predict and control the fundamentally unknowable event of contact with extraterrestrial intelligence. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and analysis of scientific literature, I argue these methods constitute scientific divination that transforms radical uncertainty into managed risk while simultaneously generating new forms of enchantment. Game-theoretical models depend on non-empirical axioms that conjure particular futures into calculable existence. Historical analogies mobilize sanitized colonial narratives as predictive tools, reading futures in the past. Post-detection protocols impose bureaucratic order onto speculative scenarios, promising control without eliminating surprise. Rather than opposing enchantment, these rational methods produce meta-empirical otherness—potential alien presences that structure present action despite their unknowability and speculative nature. SETI's predictive practices are existential technologies for navigating decisions with species-ending consequences, revealing how prediction operates and enchantment intensifies precisely where empirical grounding fails and rationalization appears most complete.