Dear friends,
Paul Pinchuk and I attended the NASA Technosignatures Workshop in Houston, TX, on September 26-28, 2018. The origin of the workshop is probably related to the House Science Appropriations Act, 2019, which includes the following language in its accompanying committee report:
Technosignatures.--The recommendation includes $10,000,000 for NASA to partner with the private sector and philanthropic organizations, to the maximum extent practicable, to search for technosignatures, such as radio transmissions, in order to meet the NASA objective to search for life's origin, evolution, distribution, and future in the universe.
The house bill has not been voted on, and the senate bill does not include any language related to technosignatures. Should the provision survive and become law, NASA would like to have some idea about the state of the field and possible ways to spend $10M. The agency could then include relevant language in a 2019 call for proposals, and perhaps fund investigations starting in 2020. Considering that the field has been starved of federal dollars for the past 25 years (NASA has not funded a single investigation focused on the search for technosignatures since 1993), many scientists are hoping that a grants program will finally be implemented.
A few of the NASA workshop participants described the apparent long-term hostility towards SETI at NASA. One of the NASA program managers in attendance acknowledged that the exclusion clause in the astrobiology call for proposals was problematic: “Proposals aimed at the identification and characterization of radio signals from extrasolar planets that may harbor intelligent life are not solicited at this time”. Another program manager apparently did not recall the exclusion clause in the exoplanet program that he manages: "Proposals aimed at identification and characterization of signals and/or properties of extrasolar planets that may harbor intelligent life are not within the scope of this program”. At the workshop, the program managers emphasized that NASA takes direction from Congress and reports by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to allocate funding.
Unfortunately, the NAS report titled "An Astrobiology Strategy for the Search for Life in the Universe" released this week by an unbalanced committee does not advocate for the search for technosignatures. The 196-page report was written by a committee of 17 scientists whose interests are aligned almost exclusively with the search for biosignatures (see April 8, 2018 newsletter). Indeed, 16 prominent scientists and I co-signed a letter addressed to NAS highlighting the lack of balance and expertise on the committee and seeking a remedy, which NAS apparently ignored.
The coverage of technosignatures in the report is deplorable. The word "technosignature" does not appear in the Table of Contents nor in the section on "The search for life in the coming decades." Instead, a single box devoted to technosignatures appears in the section on "Leveraging partnerships." By comparison, the equivalent 1990 report provided strong support for SETI (e.g., "Two parallel avenues of research should be pursued in attempts to detect life beyond the solar system: searches for evidence of biological modification of an extrasolar planet and searches for evidence of extraterrestrial technology."). The 2018 NAS report does not support SETI, which is a considerable setback.
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