Saints Spotlight: Dr John Elliott
Dr John Elliott has been a leading contributor for SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) post-detection research and development since the late 1990s. He founded the SETI Post Detection Hub at the University of St Andrews in 2022, bringing together over 50 international experts as well as St Andrews students from a range of disciplines. Together, they are working to answer the question ‘what does humanity do when we discover we are not alone in the Cosmos?’.
How did your St Andrews story start?
After taking early retirement from my post as Reader in Computer Science at Leeds Metropolitan University, a colleague (then and still) at the University of St Andrews – Dr Martin Dominik in the School of Physics and Astronomy – suggested St Andrews would be a great place to give the SETI Post-Detection Hub a home.
Subsequently, the Hub was officially launched in 2022, hosted by the Centre for Exoplanet Science and the Centre for Global Law and Governance of the University. It acts as a coordinating centre for an international effort to bring together diverse expertise across the sciences and the humanities for setting out impact assessments, protocols, procedures, and treaties designed to enable a responsible response.
There’s a chance that the existence of life beyond Earth – or even another intelligent civilisation – could be detected at any time soon, and we must be prepared.
What are your current priorities in your role at the University?
The SETI Post-Detection Hub at St Andrews is the only one in the world – it’s a first and only. We’ve grown to include over 50 members, who are international experts in their fields. We also work with students including members of the student society Order of the Crow, which is the first student branch of the Hub in the world. There are students from Computer Science, International Relations – all different subjects – and their mission is to bridge the gap between science and humanities, and to spread the word about the search for extraterrestrial life. In doing this, we are also looking to open our community to include contributions through citizen science.
We need to coordinate our expert knowledge not only for assessing the evidence but also for considering the human social response as our understanding progresses and what we know and what we don’t know is communicated. The time to do this is now. So, to communicate and establish this work, regular publications (conference, journal, reports, books, and surveys) feature as an ongoing priority.
Currently, all this work is from a community of experts that, as yet, is to secure funding to support these endeavours, which currently include 12 live projects. It is therefore a high priority, as financial support will enable us to invest in peoples’ time, and to accelerate our research and development towards our current objectives.
What is the focus of your research at St Andrews?
My work crosses many traditional boundaries and disciplines, from human [communication] language ‘universals’, computational logistics, signal processing, and global impact strategies to multidimensional linguistic models for countering online crime and terrorism.
My focus at St Andrews is on continuing to grow the Hub and ensuring we are thinking about the impact that the discovery of extraterrestrial life or intelligence elsewhere could have on society, and beyond. On a day-to-day basis, we’re organising symposia, seminars, conferences and presentations, managing publications, funding applications and proposals. Our first workshop was held in St Andrews in July this year.
Will we ever get a message from E.T.? We don’t know. We also don’t know when this is going to happen. But we do know that we cannot afford to be ill-prepared – scientifically, socially, and politically rudderless – for an event that could turn into reality as early as tomorrow and which we cannot afford to mismanage.
Tell us about your proudest achievement.
Although I have developed much to contribute towards analytical capabilities for detecting and categorising unknown communication-like phenomena and how this process will map to a post detection strategy, it has to be creating this international multidisciplinary post detection research hub at St Andrews. With it (for the first time) we have the collaborative environment needed to research and develop all the required ever-evolving elements for a comprehensive operational framework.
A significant catalyst that has seen the broad science community embrace this area of research (SETI) and therefore help bring together the many new ‘voices’ essential for this work is the discovery of exoplanets. In the mid-1990s we had little evidence of them, but by around 2008 we started to realise that there were probably as many planets as there are stars. The rate we were discovering them at was just astronomical – literally!
The numbers started to add up, suggesting there must be life out there, but at the time SETI was still a fringe endeavour. I am proud of the fact that what we are doing has become mainstream – everybody wants to get involved in this collaborative research and our work has become recognised as a valid and important undertaking.
I’m also proud to have co-founded the UK SETI Research Network (the Patron of which is Astronomer Royal Martin Rees), and to hold roles including ones on the International Academy of Astronautics SETI Permanent Committee and Moon Farside Protection Permanent Committee. There are also many public events, where I have had the pleasure of representing the Hub, but my proudest moments must be when I have presented this work at the Royal Society.
Last year, I featured in an article in Politics and Home’s House magazine entitled ‘Signal in the Noise’ and Stephen Metcalfe MP submitted a question about the UK’s preparedness in the event of the discover of intelligent extraterrestrial life. I have since been working with the government’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology at their instigation to further this discussion, and recently submitted a document of written evidence to the House of Lords Select Committee on UK Engagement with Space, evidencing the need for an integrated (Space) Post Discovery provision to coordinate science, societal, and regulatory readiness, for our security and resilience.
Where is your favourite spot in St Andrews?
I’m actually based in York and come up to St Andrews regularly. I have fond memories of a debate in Parliament Hall back in 2024 with the University’s Debating Society who were arguing to support the search for extraterrestrial life.
More broadly, I love the beaches and just being in the centre of town, walking around and enjoying the atmosphere of St Andrews.