The Order of the Octopus Macy Huston1,2 & Sofia Sheikh3 1Penn State Astronomy & Astrophysics, 2Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center, 3SETI Institute Who We Are The Order of the Octopus is a community of early-career researchers doing technosignature-related work. The group was founded by Dr. Sofia Sheikh in March 2020, to offset some of the specific difficulties in getting into SETI research, which were only exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Early-career researchers in SETI not only have to face the standard challenges of pursuing a degree or research project in STEM, but also must contend with uncertain federal funding, discouraging comments from researchers who are SETI skeptics, and often being the only person at an institution who is both early-career and pursuing technosignature science. This lack of support, evidenced in the preceding ways and in others, is uniquely challenging, and having a community to provide guidance is particularly important. Thus, the Order of the Octopus was founded to combat these challenges. The Order’s name comes from the “Order of the Dolphin,” a name adopted by attendees of the first SETI conference in Green Bank, WV in the 1960s. The members were enthralled by John Lilly’s presentation about the potential for understanding extraterrestrial languages through studying dolphin communication. The quirkiness of the name and its connection to the history of SETI research led us to adopt the name for this event. We quickly learned, however, that John Lilly’s research included unethical practices, and we did not want to keep the name due to that historic harm. To retain the camaraderie and wonder for non-human intelligences that the original name meant to us, we adopted “The Order of the Octopus,” divorcing ourselves from the dark history of the association with dolphins, and recognizing a perhaps even more interesting model for non-human intelligence on Earth! The Order of the Octopus currently manifests in a few different ways: 1) An online forum (currently on the Discord platform) with over 20 current members, hosting conversations about research, conferences, grants, and other opportunities 2) A conference organized by the group and supported by the PSETI Center: The 2021 Assembly of the Order of the Octopus (described below), with the intention of hosting similar events in the future 3) In-person meetups at other conferences, such as the 2022 PSETI Symposium. Members Our group is made up of about 22 early career researchers in SETI. Here we feature 6 members who are attending the SETI Symposium: The 2021 Assembly of the Order of the Octopus In the Summer of 2021, the OotO held a virtual conference for early-career researchers in SETI. The organizing committee members were Dr. Sofia Sheikh, Macy Huston, Nick Tusay, Tessa Fisher, and Evan Sneed, and the event was sponsored by the Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center. Our goal was to to provide networking and community-building for early-career folks in SETI by providing a venue for participants to present talks and posters, perhaps even their first talks and posters, in a safe and supportive environment. Dr. Sofia Sheikh is an NSF-ASCEND Postdoctoral Fellow working on radio technosignature searches with the Allen Telescope Array through the SETI Institute. She founded OotO in Spring 2020, and is thrilled to see how much the community has grown since! George Profitiliotis is a Postdoctoral Researcher within the Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Law of the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, investigating the pertinence of anticipation to the search for extraterrestrial life; he is mainly interested in the science-policy-society interface of the search, including technosignatures, and particularly in using insights from futures studies and prospective cognition to inform the governance of the search. Tessa Fisher's research includes investigating if atmospheric chemical reaction network topology c