InCosmiCon: a new italian-peruvian project about SETI and big history

Abstract

InCosmiCon (Intelligence in the Cosmic Context) is a project about SETI and Big History which arises on one side from the experience of the Italian SETI program, and on the other side from the project La vida en el universo: su origen, su naturaleza, su sentido (Life in the universe: its origin, its nature, its meaning), which has been developed in Peru as one of the six Oxford Templeton Visiting Fellowships to Latin America offered by the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion at the Oxford University and the John Templeton Foundation in 2017. From that project, originally proposed by two Universities of Lima, the UCSS (Universidad Católica Sedes Sapientiae) and the UNIFÉ (Universidad Femenina del Sagrado Corazón), many new relationships and projects have arisen, so that finally we had the idea of creating a stable international interdisciplinary research group, based at the University of Insubria (Italy) and open to scholars from any countries all over the world, but, first of all, from Italy and Peru. The name InCosmiCon means that we want to investigate, through both theoretical reflections and field researches, the topic of intelligent life in the universe, first of all from the point of view of classic SETI, but also into the more general framework of the so-called Big History, as strongly suggested by the present Chairman of the IAA SETI Committee, Dr. Claudio Maccone. A special role will be played, as already in the project La vida en el universo, by the UCSS Amazonian seat of Atalaya (called UCSS Nopoki), one of the very few cases in the world (maybe the unique fully successful) of a positive interaction between cultures with a very different technological level, as on one side our Western civilizations and on the other side the 14 native Amazonian peoples having their sons studying in Nopoki, which could be also a model for a positive interaction with a hypothetical extraterrestrial civilization. In the present paper some of the founders of the InCosmiCon project are going to present its basic features, its main goals, and its future perspectives.