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SCANT PUBLICATIONS. “Despite a high public profile for nearly 60 years, the field is still small and many of the search strategies identified in the 1960’s remain essentially unexplored, to say nothing of the many more recently identified avenues. Indeed, an ADS bibliography of all work in the field contains fewer than 2,000 entries, only 66 of which have more than 20 citations—​the h-index of the field ​as a whole​ is 33​.” https://lnkd.in/djnMhU6 View in LinkedIn

MASTER CLOCK. “Biological rhythms are driven by endogenous biological clocks; in mammals, the master clock is located in the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) of the hypothalamus. This master pacemaker can synchronize other peripheral oscillators in several tissues such as some involved in endocrine or reproductive functions.” https://lnkd.in/dqAxc6b View in LinkedIn

TINY COMMUNITY. “The Key Issue we identify in this white paper is the small size of the trained community of SETI practitioners, and the lack of federal support for both searches for technosignatures and for growing the community.​ This issue has led to the neglect by NASA and the NSF of one of the primary avenues for pursuing a major component of the Planetary Systems thematic area of the Astro2020 Decadal process: the search for life in the universe.” https://lnkd.in/djnMhU6 View in LinkedIn

CIRCADIAN CLOCKS. “In birds, biological clock function pervades all aspects of biology, controlling daily changes in sleep: wake, visual function, song, migratory patterns and orientation, as well as seasonal patterns of reproduction, song and migration. The molecular bases for circadian clocks are highly conserved, and it is likely the avian molecular mechanisms are similar to those expressed in mammals, including humans.” https://lnkd.in/dnUbn2y View in LinkedIn

HOMELESS SUBJECT. “Technosignatures remains, however, somewhat homeless at NASA. For instance: not all searches for technosignatures are focused on planetary systems (some focus on other galaxies, or the Solar System, or on all-sky searches, for instance), and so many worthy projects will not be in-scope at XRP. And some of the inconsistencies noted by Tarter et al. (2018) persist: for instance, Exobiology still explicitly excludes radio and microwave technosignatures from its scope for no reason other than institutional inertia.” https://lnkd.in/djnMhU6 View in LinkedIn

TINY STEPS. “As a result of the feedback NASA received from that workshop, most of the SETI-exclusionary language was removed in the amended 2018 ROSES document, and “technosignatures” was explicitly solicited in the amended version of the ROSES 2018 XRP and Exobiology calls in early 2019.” https://lnkd.in/djnMhU6 View in LinkedIn

DANCING IN THE CORNER. “At the workshop NASA Deputy Associate Administrator for Research Michael New expressed his personal view that within NASA the term “SETI” is heavily associated with HRMS and radio programs, while the term “technosignatures” is “freighted with less history” and “doesn’t provoke as many antibodies” at NASA.” https://lnkd.in/djnMhU6 View in LinkedIn

TECHNOSIGNATURES. “The rebranding seems to have helped. In 2018 Congress considered requiring NASA to include searches for technosignatures (by that name) within its science portfolio as part of the House version of the NASA appropriations bill. In anticipation of this language (which did not ultimately become law) NASA hosted the “NASA Technosignatures Workshop” in September 2018 to learn about the searches for technosignatures and how it could support them, because it had little internal expertise on the topic.” https://lnkd.in/djnMhU6 View in LinkedIn

REBRANDING SETI. “The community has long perceived that part of the difficulty is persistent confusion within and beyond NASA about whether “SETI” refers to a specific radio signal search rationale and technique, the SETI Institute itself, or to the broader effort to identify technological life in the universe. This led Tarter (2007) to coin the term “technosignatures” by analogy with biosignatures to refer to any sign of technological life, including communicative transmissions and other technologies.” https://lnkd.in/djnMhU6 View in LinkedIn