Droevendaalsesteeg 10
6708 PB Wageningen
The Netherlands
George Profitiliotis
About
George Profitiliotis is an Electrical and Computer Engineer with an MSc in Environment & Development, a postgraduate specialization in Biomimetic Technology, and a PhD in Environmental Economics. He has worked extensively in the field of Futures Studies.
Biography
George Profitiliotis is an electrical & computer engineer, further trained in interdisciplinary environmental studies, biomimetics, and strategic innovation management, and holds a PhD on the application of environmental economics to planetary protection policy. He has worked extensively in the fields of strategic foresight, futures literacy, and futures studies. During his 1st PostDoc, he studied the pertinence of anticipation to the search for extraterrestrial life from the viewpoints of particular subfields of the humanities, social sciences, and policy, with a focus on the proactive management of a future discovery. His 2nd PostDoc utilized strategic foresight to elicit over 90 future ethical, legal, and societal implications of quantum technologies. At NIOO, George is working as a PostDoc researcher on the "SPARKLES: SPARKing a nature-positive future of floating solar for humans and nature across LandscapES" project. George is also an active member of several scientific organizations working on interdisciplinary aspects of space exploration and astrobiology, including the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science, the SETI Post-Detection Hub, and the Panel on Social Sciences and Humanities of the Committee on Space Research.
He has previously worked with the Quantum Delta NL Centre for Quantum & Society, TU Delft, UNDP, the National Technical University of Athens, the Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas, the UNESCO Chair on Futures Research in Greece, the Hellenic National Commission on Bioethics and Technoethics, the Hellenic Space Technologies and Applications Cluster (si-Cluster) of the Corallia Clusters Initiative, the Greek Chapter of the National Space Society, which he co-founded as the Director of Research & Education, and the Quanta & Qualia deeptech startup, as the originator of the Magnetic Gesture Observation System (MaGOS) business idea. Throughout his career, George has received numerous honors, awards, prizes, scholarships, and distinctions in the fields of space exploration, general academic excellence, innovation & entrepreneurship, and literature, as he is also a published speculative fiction author in Greece.
Publications
Peer-reviewed publications
Enrichment of the driving metanarratives shared between SETI and space sustainability through a multispecies lens
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actaastro.2025.11.069The fields of SETI and Space Sustainability appear to have significant conceptual common ground. This article argues that this cross-fertilization of ideas is the effect of socially-shared nonfictional narratives at work in each of the two fields, which are tacitly driven by the same cross-cutting metanarrative foundations. The article suggests that the scientific communities of SETI and SS utilize such narratives to enable sense-making, decision-making, and action-generation at the collective level, under conditions of radical uncertainty. It then posits that the distinct narratives at work in each of these two fields are implicitly framed and driven by a finite set of four shared metanarratives, whose assumptions are organized on the basis of the following combinations of descriptive and normative (non-)anthropocentrism: a) descriptive anthropocentrism & normative anthropocentrism; b) descriptive anthropocentrism & normative non-anthropocentrism; c) descriptive non-anthropocentrism & normative anthropocentrism; and d) descriptive non-anthropocentrism & normative non-anthropocentrism. Despite being less intuitive than the first three, the nascent fourth one is argued to be accessible through a multispecies lens borrowed from adjacent academic bodies of work and is highlighted as very promising for stimulating fruitful dialogue between the two fields and for enriching the existing pool of competing narratives in each of them.