New Assumptions to Guide SETI Research

Brief

Colombano (2018) opens with Kepler mission findings showing Earth-analogue planetary systems as old as 11.2 Gyr (Kepler-444) and 10.4 Gyr (Kepler-10), implying some civilizations could be up to 6 Gyr more technologically advanced than Earth's. He identifies four SETI assumptions he considers unsupported under that timescale: that interstellar travel is impossible, that radio remains the dominant communication medium, that intelligence must be carbon-based, and that Earth has not been visited. The paper proposes applying a signal-in-noise framework to UFO databases, including 130,000 pages of declassified Air Force records and the NUFORC database, as a parallel SETI investigative track, and calls for interdisciplinary work spanning speculative physics, AI futurism, and techno-sociology.

Metadata

Category

Search

Venue

NASA Technical Reports Server

Type

NASA technical report

Year

2018

Authors

Silvano P. Colombano

Access

Open access

Length

99.2 K

Programs

Kepler Mission, NUFORC

Instruments

Kepler Space Telescope

Data sources

Kepler planetary catalog, NUFORC database, USAF declassified documents (130,000 pages)

Tags

SETI, technosignature, UAP-data, post-biological-intelligence, interstellar-travel, astrobiology, exoplanets

Key points

• Kepler-444 hosts a planetary system 11.2 Gyr old; Kepler-10 hosts one 10.4 Gyr old, both predating our solar system by roughly 6 Gyr, meaning some civilizations have had orders of magnitude more development time than humanity.p.1
• Colombano argues radio detection is impractical for advanced civilizations: information packing density would render signals indistinguishable from noise unless a civilization deliberately built a backward-compatible beacon.p.1
• The carbon-life assumption is challenged on the grounds that post-biological machine intelligence, already foreseeable after 50 years of computing, would remove lifespan and mass constraints on interstellar travel entirely.p.1
• UFO data is explicitly proposed for SETI-style signal-in-noise analysis, framing the existing UFO literature not as proof of visitation but as a noisy channel that may contain low-amplitude anomalous signals.p.1
• Four recommended research directions: (1) speculative physics grounded in solid theory, (2) AI and evolvable robotics futurism, (3) techno-sociological modeling of communication choices, and (4) formal UFO study.p.2
• Named data sources for Big Data analysis: 130,000 pages of declassified U.S. Air Force documents, the National UFO Reporting Center Database, and unspecified international databases.p.2
• The paper speculates that a post-biological explorer might be 'an extremely tiny super-intelligent entity,' dramatically reducing the energy cost of interstellar travel relative to biological-crew assumptions.p.1

Verbatim

• “earth like planets could exist that are 6 Gyr, older than our own.”

  p.1

• “we can surmise that we might have a real problem in predicting technological evolution even for the next thousand years, let alone 6 Million times that amount!”

  p.1

Most interesting

• Colombano calculates that a civilization 6 Gyr ahead of Earth would have had roughly 6,000,000 times longer to develop technology than humanity has, a ratio he explicitly names as making any prediction about their capabilities meaningless.
• The paper originates from inside NASA Ames and was published on the NASA Technical Reports Server, giving it institutional provenance unusual for a document that formally argues UFO reports deserve scientific study.
• Colombano treats Earth visitation not as a fringe claim but as SETI's fourth falsifiable assumption, structurally equivalent to the interstellar travel and radio-communication assumptions the field already debates openly.
• The author raises suspended animation and multi-generational missions as carbon-biology workarounds for interstellar travel before pivoting to the stronger argument that post-biological intelligence faces neither constraint.
• The paper implies that a beacon deliberately designed to be detectable by radio-era civilizations would represent a technological regression, a deliberate downgrade by a far more advanced sender.