Dr. Claire Webb & Dr. Nina Miolane — Searching for Intelligence
A SETI researcher and a geometric intelligence pioneer explore how we search for extraterrestrial life and decode intelligence in brains and machines.
Why we picked this
Two researchers approaching the question of intelligence from opposite ends — one scanning the cosmos, the other mapping its geometry in brains and code. The overlap is where it gets interesting.
Claire Isabel Webb directs the Berggruen Institute’s Future Humans program and holds a PhD from MIT, where her research focused on how scientists have searched for extraterrestrial life since the Space Age. She’s worked with the SETI Institute and UC Berkeley’s Breakthrough Listen group, studying the technologies and assumptions that shape humanity’s attempts to detect life beyond Earth.
Nina Miolane is an assistant professor at UC Santa Barbara and directs the Geometric Intelligence Lab. Her work sits at the intersection of mathematics, AI, and neuroscience — developing frameworks that explain how intelligence functions in both biological and artificial systems. She’s received the L’Oreal-UNESCO Fellowship for Women in Science and an NSF Career Award.
Together they’ll explore what intelligence actually is, how we recognize it when we find it, and whether the tools we build to understand minds might also help us find them elsewhere. At The Interval, Long Now’s intimate Fort Mason bar and event space.