Karina Mathew

2022 Harvard Horizons Scholar Karina Mathew didn’t grow up reading science fiction. In fact, her early life was decidedly low-tech; she was a teenager before she got her first computer or cell phone.

“I had a very slow pace of life in my childhood, being homeschooled,” Mathew says. "When I began college, I entered a world that felt science fictional to me as I experienced a radical shift from a low-tech life to one dominated by technology. It was a contact event of sorts."

In 2018, she entered the PhD program in English at the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences with a focus on early modern literature because she was interested in the way that the scientific revolution was represented in the works of the time. In the course of her research, Mathew discovered—and was fascinated by—17th-century stories of lunar voyages and extraterrestrial beings. Around the same time, astronomers observed for the first time an interstellar object passing through the solar system. Named Oumuamua—a Hawaiian word meaning “a messenger from afar arriving first”—by astronomers, the size, shape, and behavior of the object were different than typical asteroids. Scientists didn’t quite know what to make of it.

Mathew was captivated.

“I found myself comparing the early modern work and the recent discovery of an object that may or may not have originated from an interstellar civilization,” she says. “And as I began to compare these two, I also delved into a lot of contemporary science fiction which spoke more directly to contact with extraterrestrial life. That exploration took over my research. I switched from being an early modernist to a scholar of 20th and 21st-century literature so that I could explore science fiction and other works that speak directly to the experience of living in the contemporary world."

“Imagining Extraterrestrial Contact,” Mathew’s Harvard Horizons project, is part of her effort to better understand what it means to be a human in a world that's dominated by science and technology—and in a universe in which we might not be alone. With the advancement of observational technology—for instance, the new James Webb telescope situated nearly a million miles from Earth—the detection of extraterrestrial life increasingly becomes a possibility.  And while scientists have long had a love-hate relationship with speculative fictions, Mathew says that they are in constant engagement with them as they search for extraterrestrial life.

“Astrobiologists, for instance, don't like to talk about science fiction because it might damage the reputation of their field,” she says. “But they also often use science fiction as a reference for different types of scenarios. So much of the landscape of this field is in the imagination—thinking of what we might or might not find. Science fiction fills a gap until we find life in the universe, but it also helps us to think critically about what we’re looking for and how we’re looking for it.”

Mathew’s larger goal is to think about life, intelligence, and civilization more creatively and flexibly. She believes that, by engaging our imaginations, we can move beyond the restrictions of our technology and our human expectations.

“We need to be able to conceive of the fact that other life forms might think in very different ways,” she says. “If we're expecting them to communicate with human linguistics, mathematics or in ways that are recognizable to us as science or technology, we might miss out on some remarkable phenomenon. If we can get out of the mindset that human intelligence, human tools, and the human way of life are the epitome of what biology can produce, we might be better able to see what other magnificent forms of life might exist in the universe.”