2018/09/18 by Jason T. Wright, Wright, Jason T., Sofia Z. Sheikh +11 · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP) #FOS: Physical sciences #Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM) #Planetary Science and Exploration #Popular Physics (physics.pop-ph) #Space Science and Extraterrestrial Life #Space exploration and regulation #astro-ph.EP #astro-ph.IM #physics.pop-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1809.06857
10pp, to be presented at the NASA Technosignatures Workshop in Houston, TX, USA Sep. 26-28, 2018
arxiv created 2018/09/18 · openalex publication_date 2018/09/18 · arxiv updated 2018/09/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The Ad Hoc Committee on SETI Nomenclature was convened at the suggestion of Frank Drake after the Decoding Alien Intelligence Workshop at the SETI Institute in March 2018. The purpose of the committee was to recommend standardized definitions for terms, especially those that are used inconsistently in the literature and the scientific community. The committee sought to recommend definitions and terms that are a compromise among several desirable but occasionally inconsistent properties for such terms: 1) Consistency with the historical literature and common use in the field; 2) Consistency with the present literature and common use in the field; 3) Precision of meaning; 4) Consistency with the natural (i.e. everyday, non-jargon) meanings of terms; 5) Compatibility with non-English terms and definitions. The definitions in this report are restricted to technical, SETI contexts, where they may have jargon senses different from their everyday senses. In many cases we include terms only to deprecate them (in the sense of "to withdraw official support for or discourage the use of...in favor of a newer or better alternative", Merriam-Webster sense 4). This is a consensus document that the committee members all endorse; however, in many cases the individual members have (or have expressed in the past) more nuanced opinions on these terms that are not fully reflected here, for instance Almár (2008, Acta Astronautica, 68, 351), Denning (2008, NASA-SP-2009-4802 Ch. 3 pp.63-124), and Wright (2018, arXiv:1803.06972).