Recommendations from the Ad Hoc Committee on SETI Nomenclature
Jason T. Wright, Sofia Sheikh, Iván Almár, Kathryn Denning, Steven Dick, Jill Tarter
(Submitted on 18 Sep 2018)
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
Alm\’ar (2008, Acta Astronautica, 68, 351), Denning (2008,
NASA-SP-2009-4802 Ch. 3 pp.63-124), and Wright (2018, arXiv:1803.06972).
Comments: 10pp, to be presented at the NASA Technosignatures Workshop in Houston, TX, USA Sep. 26-28, 2018
Subjects:
Popular Physics (physics.pop-ph); Earth and Planetary Astrophysics
(astro-ph.EP); Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
(astro-ph.IM)
Cite as: arXiv:1809.06857 [physics.pop-ph] (or arXiv:1809.06857v1 [physics.pop-ph] for this version)
Submission history
From: Jason Wright
[v1] Tue, 18 Sep 2018 13:06:25 GMT (204kb)
https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.06857
Astrobiology
