As an astrophysicist that searches for signs of alien technology beyond Earth, I’m often asked these days what I think about Avi Loeb.  

Loeb, you might know, recently rose to public prominence with his claims that the first discovered interstellar comet, ‘Oumuamua, is actually a piece of an alien spacecraft passing through the Solar System.  Since then he has headlined UFO conventions, written a very popular book about his claim, and raised millions of dollars to study UFOs with his “Galileo Project” initiative. His latest venture with that money is to sweep a metal detector across the Pacific to find fragments of what he claims is another interstellar visitor that the US military detected crashing into the ocean, resulting in the headline “Why a Harvard professor thinks he may have found fragments of an alien spacecraft” in the Independent.  

Loeb has the credentials to be taken seriously.  He is a well-respected theoretical cosmologist that has made foundational contributions to our understanding of the early universe.  He served as the chair of the Harvard astronomy department, and leads the distinguished Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.  He is well known as an outside-the-box thinker who is brave enough to be wrong often enough to occasionally be right in important and unexpected ways. He is a prolific paper writer, mentor to many students and postdoctoral researchers, and a leader in the community.  I, in particular, was strongly influenced by a lecture he gave on “diversifying one’s research portfolio” to include a lot of safe but passé research, some more risky cutting edge work, and a small amount of outré science.  It’s important advice for any scientific field.

But his shenanigans have lately strongly changed the astronomy community’s perceptions of him. His recent claims about alien spacecraft and comets and asteroids largely come across to experts as, at best, terribly naive, and often as simply erroneous (Loeb has no formal training or previous track record to speak of in planetary science, which has little in common with the plasma physics he is known for). His promotion of his claims in the media is particularly galling to professionals who discover and study comets, who were very excited about the discovery of ‘Oumuamua but have found their careful work dismissed and ridiculed by Loeb, who is the most visible scientist discussing it in the media.

Most recently, his claims to have discovered possible fragments of an alien ship in the Pacific  have been criticized by meteoriticists at a recent conference. Loeb claims the metallic spherules he found trawling the ocean floor are from the impact site of an interstellar object (dubbed 20140108 CNEOS/USG) but they point out that they are much more likely to have come from ordinary meteorites or even terrestrial volcanoes or human activities like coal burning ships or WWII warfare in the area. And, they argue, 20140108 most likely did not come from outside the Solar System at all. (It also appears that Loeb may have violated legal and ethical norms by removing material from Papua New Guinean waters—you’re not supposed to just go into other countries and collect things without permission.) 

Also frustrating is how Loeb’s book and media interviews paint him as a heroic, transformational figure in science, while career-long experts in the fields he is opining on are characterized as obstinate and short-sighted. His Galileo Project has that name because it is “daring to look through new telescopes.” In his book claiming ‘Oumuamua is an alien spacecraft, he unironically compares himself to the father of telescopic astronomy, Galileo himself. The community was aghast when he blew up at Jill Tarter, a well-respected giant in the field of SETI and one of the best known women in science in the world. (When Tarter expressed annoyance at his dismissal of others’ work in SETI, he angrily accused her of “opposing” him, and of not doing enough for SETI, as if anyone had done more! Loeb later apologized to Tarter and his colleagues, calling his actions “inappropriate”).  

It is true that there is much work to be done to normalize work on SETI and UFOs in scientific circles. Tarter herself has worked for decades to change attitudes about SETI at NASA and among astronomers generally, to get them to embrace the serious, peer-reviewed work to answer one of the biggest questions in science (as I’ve written about before). Scientifically rigorous studies of UFOs have also begun to make inroads, most notably with NASA’s recent panel advising it on the topic (Loeb was pointedly not involved; I must note that I see the UFO and SETI questions as scientifically unrelated). But Loeb’s work is unambiguously counterproductive, alienating the community working on these problems and misinforming the public about the state of the field. 

So it is against all of this background that, even when asked, I have generally stayed quiet lately when it comes to Loeb, or tried to give a balanced and nuanced perspective. I do appreciate that he is moving the scientific “Overton Window”, making SETI, which used to (unfairly) seem like an outlandish corner of science, seem practically mainstream by comparison. I appreciate the support he’s given to my work in SETI, and I generally discourage too much public or indiscriminate criticism of him lest the rest of the field suffer “splash damage.”

I have noticed, however, that Loeb’s work and behavior have been seen as so outrageous in many quarters that it essentially goes unrebutted in popular fora by those who are in the best position to explain what, exactly, is wrong about it. This leaves a vacuum, where the public hears only Loeb’s persuasive and articulate voice, with no obvious public pushback from experts beyond exasperated eye-rolling that feeds right into his hero narrative.  

So for the past several months, I’ve worked with Steve Desch and Sean Raymond, two planetary scientists and experts on ‘Oumuamua, to correct the record.  It has taken a lot of time: as Jonathan Swift wrote, “falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.”  I read Loeb’s book on ‘Oumuamua, cover to cover, and carefully noted each of his arguments that ‘Oumuamua is anything other than a comet or asteroid. The three of us then went through and did our best to take an objective look at whether his statement of the evidence is correct, whether it really supports the alien spacecraft hypothesis, and whether it is actually consistent with ‘Oumuamua being a comet. No surprise, we find that under careful scrutiny his claims are often incorrect, and that there is little to no evidence that ‘Oumuamua is an artificial object. We’ve done our best in our rebuttal to avoid criticizing Loeb or his behavior, and to focus instead just on what we do and do not know about ‘Oumuamua. You can find our analysis here.  

There is little joy in or reward for debunking claims in science. We would all rather be finding new natural phenomena to celebrate than spending a lot of time correcting the mistakes or false claims of others published years earlier.

Because the truth is, we’re entering a new era of astronomy where we can for the first time contemplate studying samples from other solar systems, where we are seeing the first serious and comprehensive searches for signs of alien technology among the stars, and where truly new telescopes and methods are unlocking secrets of the universe that will thrill fans of science around the world, without any need for sensationalism. Now that we’ve addressed Loeb’s most outlandish claims about ‘Oumuamua, I’m excited to get back to work on it!

NASA is reportedly moving towards ending all proprietary periods for NASA missions, including GO programs. This would mean that a researcher who wins JWST time in future cycles will not have any exclusive access to the data—it will be available to the world the moment it lands.

I wrote an Op-Ed for SciAm on the topic, which summarizes my position. You can read it here.  I summarize it below, but one thing I noticed is a huge split in reactions to my Op-Ed between near-unanimity by astronomers that proprietary periods are important, and non-scientists who don’t understand why public access and moving science as fast as possible isn’t more important than the needs of astronomers. This seems especially clear on Reddit.

Click for my SciAm Op-Ed

I’ve learned that the public doesn’t appreciate that a scientist who spends years developing an idea reasonably expects to get credit for it by publishing the final result. They see that as somehow selfish and bad for science. I need to keep this in mind when I bring it up in the future.

Anyway here’s the argument:

The push for ending JWST proprietary time is supposedly coming from the White House, which is promoting open access to research output and data upon publication. That’s great!

Zero EAP certainly has a significant role to play in astronomy, especially for survey data and programs that were designed with broad community input. Data generated *by* the community should be data available *to* the community. TESS and Kepler showed how powerful this can be.

But zero EAP is badly inappropriate for GO programs conceived and designed by small groups. Data generated *by* a small group should be available *to* that small group, so they can get full credit for their work. This is standard across science.

A citation to a proposal number in the acknowledgements of a scooping paper is not meaningful credit that a proposer can use in their career. I explore this more here.

Also, if GO programs have zero proprietary period there will be strong social pressures not to use those data for a while, especially if the PI is a student. But many astronomers will ignore these pressures, and others might not appreciate students are PI of a program.

This will lead to unnecessary and difficult ethical challenges in the community. Zero EAP means we have to navigate these things through fuzzy and evolving community norms with little guidance. EAPs keep the rules clear and benefit everyone, keeping honest people honest.

NASA seems to be arguing fully open data is an equity issue, but zero EAP benefits well-resourced astronomers most. They are the ones who can afford to hire teams to hoover up archival data and quickly turn it around, scooping the PIs of the data. EAPs keep astronomy fair.

Zero EAP will be bad for the profession because it will encourage poor work-life balance as astronomers go into “crunch time” mode as soon as data land to avoid being scooped (or to scoop others). EAPs allow astronomers to work at an appropriate pace.

Zero EAPs will lead to sloppy results, as astronomers prize being first over being right. Good science takes time, and scientists should be *encouraged* to get it right, not balancing care against the risk of losing the whole project. EAPs keep astronomy rigorous.

Zero EAP is inconsistent with open access standards, which require data to be public upon publication. Forcing small team’s data to be public before analysis would make NASA and astronomy outliers among sciences.

Zero EAP is equivalent to requiring chemists to post their lab notebooks and raw data online as they do their experiments as a condition of winning grant money. It does not pass the smell test.

NASA has intimated that if zero EAP hurts under-resourced scientists, then the solution is to give them more resources. First of all: if NASA’s really going to address structural inequities across science, GREAT! But, can we do that first please?

Also: The relevant resource is time, and money is an imperfect substitute for this. Many researchers are not at institutions where they can “buy themselves out” or realistically hire a postdoc. It also doesn’t help students. EAPs are a narrowly tailored solution to the problem.

I encourage my colleagues to fill out the STScI poll with their opinion, and to share the poll widely in the field.  The survey closes Feb 15, 2023.

I used to chair the HET TAC (time allocation committee) at Penn State, and we didn’t have the bandwidth to give detailed feedback on proposals. But we did want to help out proposers, especially junior scientists, who were writing proposals that were not getting the time they requested (this is a SCHOOL after all!).

So as a compromise between that goal and the limitations of our resources, I drafted a generic “how to write a good telescope proposal” document, which I’m pretty proud of.

It’s not about how to do the technical parts, it’s about the actual “grantsmanship” involved. This can often feel like crass salesmanship, so part of my intent was to put the reader in the shoes of a TAC member who wants to give their proposal time so they can appreciate why this sort of thing is not just useful but actually an essential part of good science.

(On that note I recommend all astronomers who must compete for resources read Marc Kuchner’s Marketing for Scientists, which really helped me overcome my hangups about self-promotion, and appreciate the difference between honest (and necessary) marketing, and slimy, unethical salesmanship. In fact, one lesson I learned from that book is to write blog posts like this one!).

A lot of the advice I wrote works for any kind of proposal writing (fellowships, grants, jobs) so I’ve modified it to be generic, and pasted it below.

One piece that’s not in here is writing a proposal to meet the rubric criteria.  If you’re lucky enough to be proposing for time to NOIRLab or another body that publishes its rubric, then you can actually score your proposal against it yourself (or swap proposals with someone) to see where you can strengthen it.

OK, here it is. What have I missed?

Enjoy!

Writing a Great Telescope Proposal

Telescope time can be quite competitive, with oversubscription ratios of 2-10 or even higher. Because of this, a lot of meritorious science will not get the time requested.

This means that TAC members will select proposals not just based on their technical feasibility and scientific importance but on how well justified the science is, whether they are personally excited about the science, how well the proposal is written, and harder to define subjective criteria. Writing a winning proposal is not, then, just a matter of describing your science well, but of conveying to the committee your own sense of excitement and importance of the work. Doing this well is an art.

To illustrate this: consider two proposals, both alike in worthiness, in the fair conference room where we lay our scene of the TAC deliberations. Forced to choose between them for the last 2 nights of time, the committee cannot help but consider these factors:

1. Following the directions:
   One proposal has 12 point font throughout, 1 page of figures and references, and all the text stays in the box, just as the instructions required.
   
   The other has target tables with illegibly small entries, violates the page limits, and has text bleeding outside of the boxes. The TAC gets the sense that the proposers are trying to unfairly include more information than other proposers were allowed to include, and also that the proposers are not giving the proposal process its due attention.
2. Justifying the request for time:
   Telescope time is precious, and the TAC needs to know how much you really need to succeed.
   
   One proposal has a signal to noise calculation rooted in the underlying science. The TAC has a good sense of where the number comes from. The contingency section has a careful description of what would happen if the proposal got, say, half the time requested.
   
   The other is requesting visits to ten targets with no prioritization, with exposure times calculated for SNR of 100, with no justification for that number.
   
   One proposal notes that the time previously awarded for the project by the TAC resulted in data that has been reduced; shows a figure illustrating how the data can be translated into compelling science; and explains why additional observations are needed in order to publish. The other proposal notes that it was awarded time previously, but does not mention whether it was reduced or not, or why they need additional time.
3. Justifying the request for queue priority / temporal restrictions:
   One proposal has calculated the number of nights in the semester during which the observations could be made, justifying its cuts on airmass and moonlight contamination.
   
   The other proposal has a brief statement that they need the tight constraint because their “observations are time sensitive.”
4. Having a compelling figure:
   One proposal synthesizes what makes the science so compelling in an easy to read figure. It has large font, is not too busy, uses multiple, redundant point/line properties to clearly illustrate a third dimension, and conveys a few key ideas. From the figure the TAC quickly understands (for instance) the strength of the signal expected by the proposed observations, the new physical parameter space explored by them, or the factor by which the number of such detections will increase if the time is awarded. The caption text explains exactly what the TAC members should understand by looking at the figure, and connects it to the proposal text.
   
   The other proposal has a very hard to read and interpret figure filled with extraneous information, perhaps because the figure was taken from another context with little or no modification. The colorblind TAC member cannot distinguish the points and so needs it explained to them by the other members. The TAC members spend a lot of time arguing about what it is trying to convey because the caption, while technically accurate, does not interpret the figure in the context of the underlying science.
5. Showing a clear path to an important result:
   One proposal shows that these observations will triple the number of examples of a newly appreciated phenomenon. It connects this phenomenon to an important question in astrophysics, and illustrates how this is a result that the community will be excited to see, regardless of the outcome. The proposal explains the reasons this exciting science has not been done before, emphasizing the competitive advantage this telescope offers the TAC host institution in answering the question, so the TAC understands why this is an excellent use of the telescope.
   
   The other proposal is to observe a few more examples of a phenomenon that, as far as the TAC can tell, has been observed dozens of times before with other instruments. The proposal argues simply that the observations “will inform studies” of the phenomenon.
6. Arguing with strong prose:
   One proposal is easy to read, written in the active voice with tight, forthright prose that has been proofread and polished by the co-authors. The scientific justification lays out the problem being addressed clearly, emphasizing the place of these observations in the broader scientific landscape. The TAC members finish reading it quickly, with a good sense of the nature and importance of the work. A small number of key messages are in boldface or italics, so the TAC can quickly find them when deliberating.
   
   The other proposal was written in a single draft a few hours before the deadline. It is written in dense, highly technical prose in the passive voice, and filled with technical hedging, irrelevant qualifications, and unnecessary verbiage. Some references are malformed, some words are misspelled, and there are many run-on sentences. The TAC members have to reread sections of it multiple times before they can quite parse what is being conveyed. The TAC members finish reviewing the proposal with a vague sense of the importance of the science and the way the observations fit in. During deliberation, there are long pauses while TAC members hunt for a key piece of information they think they remember reading.

Clearly, the first proposal will (and should!) get the time, and the second will not. This is because even though the actual merit of the science is identical for both proposals, the first proposal makes that merit easy to see, and the second does not. So make sure you are writing the first proposal, not the second one!

A couple of years ago I posted about what I felt was a misguided paper by Wisian & Traphagen about what they felt was an underappreciated danger of SETI: not that we might find something dangerous out there, but that finding something would trigger a geopolitical fight over the discovery that would endanger the personal security of the scientists involved, and their families.

Briefly, they imagine that the discovery would involve communication between Earth and a technologically advanced culture, which would be monopolized by the country responsible for the discovery.  Since this monopoly might grant that country a huge technological and military advantage, “realpolitik” analysis predicts a subsequent cascade of political, espionage, and even military struggle among nations, with radio telescopes and the scientists involved caught in the middle.   The authors recommend that radio telescopes have hardened security, like nuclear facilities, and that SETI practitioners consider personal security for themselves and their family.

In my post, I broke down what I felt were the shortcomings of the paper, that the contact scenario they envision was highly contrived, and that their recommendations were unnecessary. I also discussed how it would have been a better paper if they had consulted actual experts in SETI before publishing about how it works.

Well, taking my own advice, I asked if I knew any experts in international law that could help me write a proper rebuttal.  Twitter to the rescue!

Hi

— Gabriel (@Monkeybane_DC) May 26, 2020

Grabriel Swiney at the time worked at the State Department, where he was an architect of the Artemis accords. Exactly the sort of expert that should weigh in on this sort of thing!  Although we had never met (and still haven’t!) IRL, we got to work drafting a response.

Later, I started interacting with Chelsea Haramia, a philosopher at Spring Hill College (we discussed emergence here) who joined the effort. She helped us pick apart the realpolitik component of the W&T paper.

We summarize the narrowness of the Wisian & Traphagen analysis as requiring 9 elements:

1) the signal must be from one of the nearest stars, 2) communicative, 3) intelligible, and 4) information rich; 5) it must be strong enough to provide dense information content, but 6) weak enough that only the largest telescopes or telescope arrays can detect it; 7) a small number of exchanges must be sufficient to derive information about “new physics”; and 8) this new physics must be powerful enough to be translated into a dominating technology, but 9) it is not so “advanced” that we have no hope of quickly understanding and implementing it.

While such a scenario is salient (it and the subsequent geopolitical fallout are essentially the plot of Arrival and Contact), we take issues with each of the 9 points.

We next take aim at the use of realpolitik to analyze the situation, which says that nations actions are ultimately guided by the idea that “power only respects power”. While such an analysis might motivate some state-level actions, we point out both the theoretical and empirical flaws in that analysis.

Now, Wisian & Traphapen take pains to point out that this realpolitik analysis does not have to be correct, it (and the 9-point scenario above) only have to be plausible to warrant advance planning to deal with it.  However, we point out that it’s not enough for a scenario to be plausible, it has to dominate a competition with other potential future outcomes in order to be action-guiding.  We mention other scenarios that argue for different reactions, and ask why it is the realpolitik scenario that should control our actions.

Furthermore, we argue that following Wisian & Traphagen’s advice and hardening security at SETI facilities (in addition to radically hampering radio astronomy) would be counterproductive.  In addition to being ineffective (Wisian & Traphagen seem to think that securing only a small number of large facilities would allow for a long-lived information monopoly on a signal from space), such actions could lead to the perception that some important military technology had been gleaned from contact with aliens, and thus trigger the kind of fallout Wisian & Traphagen are worried about. We argue that rather than taking such fallout as a foregone conclusion, we should avoid the scenario in the first place.

We point to international collaboration on a wide variety of sensitive topics, including the management of nuclear fusion technology under ITER, as familiar examples of alternative frameworks for avoiding international strife. We also argue that educating the relevant policymakers on the nature of SETI (including the virtual impossibility of an information monopoly and the extreme unlikelihood of it being militarily useful) in advance is a far more effective way to prevent the ills Wisian & Traphagen foresee.

Finally, we argue that a policy of open data sharing and transparency is an antidote to those ills, and that this stance is one the community currently leans towards.

In the end, we conclude a lot of work needs to done in the realm of post-detection protocols to protect SETI researchers and ensure an eventual discovery does not do harm here on Earth.

It was great doing this sort of interdisciplinary work (humanities, social sciences, law, and physical science!). I recommend it!

After two and a half years of work (I’ve never had such a drawn out review process!) the paper has been accepted to Space Policy (where the original article appeared) but you can find it on the arXiv here.

Enjoy!

When I was little a wintertime tradition was the preparation of “Artillery Punch,” which I understood to have been derived from a military tradition from my grandfather’s time in the service. It was chilled and served outside in the snow.

Recently, my mother found the recipe we used, which appears to be a stained photocopy of a stained typewritten original. Here it is:

The recipe for First Artillery Punch

The text reads (with my annotations as footnotes):

Given to us¹ by General Ruhlen²   Fort Banks 1960

As a memento of this occasion, herewith the recipe of the concoction you have been drinking.

This is alleged to be First Artillery Punch,³ and in view of its ingredients, which were in common use some 100 years ago, it has a certain ring of authenticity about it. It was given to my father about 50 years ago by Colonel Marshall Randol, who in turn got it from his father⁴ who was the Commanding Officer of the First Artillery Regiment in the Civil War. The elder Randol stated that this was a recipe which was frequently used before, during and after Civil War times by the First Artillery.

Prepare a pint of triple strength black tea and a pint of triple strength green tea and blend the two together.

Place in the punch bowl or a suitable container about 1/3 of a pound of loaf sugar⁵. Grate upon it the rinds of 3 lemons, then their juice, and the juice of 2 oranges.

Pour over all the boiling hot tea mixture. Stir well and put aside to cool, covering the container to prevent the escape of the aroma.

When perfectly cool, stirring slowly, add 1 quart of Jamaica Rum (not the light bodied Puerto Rican variety); then 1 quart of good sherry, and then 1 pint of good brandy. Mix the ingredients well and chill. Years ago the chilling was accomplished by surrounding the container with snow or ice.

When ready for use place a block of clear ice in the bowl and then to the mixture add a quart of champagne with greatly improves the punch and gives it life.

I understand that prior to the Civil War apple or peach brandy was used instead of champagne. The quantities as given above are suitable for small groups, such as we found on one or two company posts—about 25 people. I was also told that when entertaining other branches of the service it was necessary to dilute the punch with an equal amount of mineral water or tea, but this seems an unnecessary degradation of good punch.

¹ This italicized text is handwritten. Presumably given to my grandfather Elwood “Van” Hattersley’s family when he was stationed there or attending a function there at Fort Banks, in Massachusetts.

² Presumably Maj. Gen. George Ruhlen (1911-2003) son of Col. George Ruhlen Jr. https://corregidor.org/archive/ruhlen/mills/html/mills_03_07.htm

³ Not to be confused with Chatham Artillery Punch, a similar drink: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatham_Artillery_Punch

⁴ Alanson Merwin Randol (1837–1887) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alanson_Merwin_Randol

⁵Also called sugarloaf, a hard form of sugar common before the introduction of granulated sugar and sugar cubes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugarloaf

If you like culture and road trips, I think my town of State College, PA is the best place in America to live! You can see more culture in a reasonable drive from here than from anywhere else.

Locals like to say that State College is “centrally isolated”: we aren’t near anything, but there are lots of cities with good culture all 3-4 hours away (almost like they’re avoiding us!) So when we moved here, Julia and I agreed we would not fear the road trip!

Now Central PA has plenty of charms, especially if you’re an outdoorsy type (we’re the fly fishing capital of the world, there’s Amish Country nearby, State College itself gets plenty of culture at our theaters and big arena, etc., etc.). But in all honesty, it’s probably not all that much more than a typical town or city with a large university. So that’s not what I mean. Obviously, if you want to spend a few days soaking up cultural experiences, it’s better to be in a big city.

A reasonable road trip is about 4 hours. That’s long enough to count as a road trip, but short enough that you don’t lose a whole day to travel, it’s possible to make the trip in a single shot, if you like, and there’s no reason to fly. So that’s our radius: 4 hours on the road. That gives us New York, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington. That’s a lot!

In fact, I think State College has access to more great cultural experiences than any other place in America.

To quantify this, we need a proxy for “culture.” I’ll choose NFL and MLB stadiums, not because sports==culture, but because active major league stadia are an easy-to-count proxy for “cultural things to do”. A city with more than one stadium probably has more culture than one with only one (New York City > Buffalo). It’s imperfect, but simple.

So get this: there are fourteen such stadia within a 4 hours’ drive of State College*! 7 MLB, 7 NFL— that is almost a quarter of all of them! We can reach Pittsburgh and Cleveland to the West, Buffalo to the North, and all of the big Eastern Seaboard cities from Washington up except Boston.

I think these numbers are higher than anywhere else in the North America (in both either league and in total). I taught myself the Google Maps API to calculate this properly. My function accepts a location and a driving range, and it returns the number of stadia within that range.

It’s very slow, so I can’t make a proper contour map of the US, so this means I can’t prove that State College is the global maximum in the US, but spot checking elsewhere shows nowhere else comes even close.

If you have another candidate location for a local or global maximum, let me know!

In the meantime, on behalf of Centre County I’m declaring us the cultural capital of the United States.

*Technically, Citi Field is 4h6m from my house, so my radius is 4h6m, not 4 hours even. Bellefonte and many nearby points north on I-99 have 14 stadia within less than 4 hours flat, and the local minimum time to all 14 is probably somewhere near the I-99/I-80 interchange.

One reason I stick to using LaTeX is that it’s pedantic about typography and I’m a recreational language pedant.

For instance, LaTeX marks up hyphens, en-dashes, and em-dashes as ‘-‘, ‘--‘, and ‘---‘ which makes it very easy to type in which one you want. (They’re called “en” and “em” because they’re supposed to be the width of the n and m in any given typeface.)

You can do this easily in most word processing programs, too: On a Mac, Option+’-‘ is an en-dash, Option+Shift+’-‘ is an em-dash. On a PC, use Alt and the numeric minus sign the same way. On a PC laptop there’s no good way but apparently Word recognizes Space+’-‘ as en-dash and Space+’--‘ (that’s two hyphens) as em-dash.

But which one do you want?

Hyphens join two words into a single unit, as in an adjectival phrase (“better-than-average player”). They also, of course, are used when words are broken across two lines.

En-dashes are used to express a range (“5–10 year sentence”).

Em-dashes mark a pause, setting one part of a sentence off from the other, as in a parenthetical or appositive (“The weather—which was unseasonably hot—oppressed them.”, “I can think of only one exception—the platypus”). In general, em-dashes could usually be replaced by commas, parentheses, or colons.

Here’s a handy guide to help you remember:

Hyphen:

He asked her to give him a surprise, so she gave him one-two punches.

She gave him a series of boxing combinations.

En-dash:

He asked her to give him a surprise, so she gave him one–two punches.

She game him either one or two punches (read: “one to two punches”).

Em-dash:

He asked her to give him a surprise, so she gave him one—two punches.

Two punches were the surprise.

You’re welcome!

Dave Amato was a biostatistician who led the design and analysis of clinical trials for several important therapies, including AZT to treat AIDS, Lunesta to treat insomnia, and Trikafta to treat cystic fibrosis. He was also a son, a husband, a father, and a beloved family member to many.  Dave died of brain cancer peacefully and painlessly Wednesday, September 23 at 12:30pm surrounded by his family. He was 66.

He was my stepfather.

Dave and Victoria with their grandchildren, E and S.

Dave was born on August 14, 1954 and lived in Hamden, CT. He grew up on a farm on the lower floor of a two-story house. Dave’s mother was of full Irish descent and his father full Italian, and he grew up in a tight-knit, extended family with his siblings Don and Linda, his parents Barbara and Lou, and his paternal grandparents upstairs. Dave had 26 cousins. Lou would die young, at almost the same age as Dave, but wonderful Barbara is still a regular and story-filled presence at family gatherings. 

Lou was very handy with a hammer and saw, a trait he passed on to Dave. When the farm was claimed by eminent domain when Dave was 13, the family moved into a house his father built nearby. In his senior year of high school the family finished a vacation cottage in Moodus, CT where the family spent summer weekends. The cottage was still in the family until recently, and I have many of the same youthful memories as Dave does at that house: spending summer weekends on the lake, swinging in the hammock, and playing “all-terrain” bocce in the yard.

Dave attended Colgate University, where he majored in mathematics, was a member of Sigma Chi, and where he met many lifelong friends. He graduated in 1976 with Phi Beta Kappa honors. There Dave met Beth Collea (class of 1978) and they were married in Hamilton, NY in 1978.

Dave at Colgate

Together, Dave and Beth had three wonderful children, Dan, Karen, and Debbie. Dan is a computer programmer in Iowa from whom I have been the beneficiary of many video games he has helped program (I and my children are particularly grateful for the Rock Band ports to the Wii). Karen is an artist that lives in Maine; regulars to the blog and my office will recognize Karen’s artwork. Debo lives in Cambridge and works in development for the Boston Children’s Museum.

In 1982 Dave earned his PhD in operations research from Cornell University, where he developed new methods for conducting clinical trials for cancers. Clinical trials for fatal diseases are tricky because the subjects often or, sometimes, nearly always die during the trial, so you have to measure survival time, not whether the therapy made them better. In clinical trials you also often have patients whose outcomes you can’t learn because they leave the trial or for some other reason, which results in “censored” data (in the physical sciences we usually just call these “upper” or “lower limits”). The branch of statistics that deals with these issues is called “survival analysis” for this reason, and its techniques are now common throughout the sciences, including in astronomy.

Shortly out of graduate school, Dave worked as a study statistician on clinical trials for treatments of carcinomas, melanomas, mesotheliomas, and sarcomas. In his first job at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, he worked on chemotherapy and radiation therapies for bladder cancer and untreatable lung cancer. In a strange twist of fate, his work there included studies of gliomas in the neurooncology department, where I would join him decades later for an appointment to hear the biopsy results on his own glioma.

Dave worked for five years as an assistant professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, and another two as an associate research scientist at the University of Michigan.

In 1989 Dave rejoined the Harvard School of Public Health as the Head of Biostatistics at the Statistical and Data Analysis Center (SDAC). This was a particularly formative time in his life, where he met many lifelong friends and, eventually, his second wife, Victoria Hattersley, my mother. I was around 14 at the time.

We had just moved to Boston several weeks earlier, and moved in with my uncles Michael and David.  Around the time we arrived, David was diagnosed with HIV, and mom wanted to help. So she took a job at SDAC despite being badly overqualified for it, because she wanted to contribute to the important work being done there developing therapies for HIV.

Dave was particularly proud of the work he did at SDAC, where he was lead statistician on multiple HIV therapies, including AZT. At the time, HIV was a death sentence, and there were no effective therapies. AZT was ultimately approved on the basis of another trial, but SDAC was an important part of the worldwide effort to find a cure. Today, the disease is mostly manageable with medications thanks to those efforts, although they were too late for David.

In 1994 Dave left academia for industry, including working as executive director of biostatistics at Sepracor, where he led the statistical analysis for the sleep drug Lunesta. He told me that the Lunesta trial was the best trial he ever analyzed: they hit every endpoint easily and early, becoming the first (and still only) sleep drug approved for long-term treatment of insomnia by the FDA. He and my mother, both of whom suffer from insomnia, used it loyally ever since. Dave told me he encouraged leadership at Sepracor to run a head-to-head trial against Ambien because he was sure it would prove superior and knock it out of the market, but they seemed satisfied having the “long-term” advantage and never risked such a trial.

Dave climbed the corporate ladder, working for several other companies throughout his career. He was senior director of biometrics at Shire HGT, where he worked on FDA approval for Firazyr, which treats hereditary angioedema.  As I write this, I’m looking at the trophy on his desk he got when it was approved.

Dave demonstrating his impeccable bocce technique at my wedding.

Dave finished his career at Vertex Pharmaceuticals, where he served as Vice President and Head of Innovation and Methodology, and worked on FDA approval of Trikafta. Vertex for a long time has been the main company working on cystic fibrosis treatments. The disease makes it hard to impossible to breathe, and it’s effectively fatal: few people with it live past their 30’s.

This is a hard disease to develop treatments for because it is so rare; to get a big enough N in your clinical trial you have to enroll most of the people who suffer from it. Since a new drug can cost billions of dollars to develop, most pharmaceutical companies won’t even try to treat diseases without millions of potential customers, but fortunately, the US government has financial incentives for pharmaceutical companies to pursue therapies for rare diseases, and Vertex built its business on this funding for “orphan” drug development.

In the US, about 90% of people with cystic fibrosis suffer from a common genetic mutation, and based on that discovery in 1989 Vertex had a few promising therapies they were pursuing. Until recently, they were all not very effective. Trikafta was a cocktail of three of those therapies, and Dave led the analysis of the clinical trial data for this approach.

It worked. Cystic fibrosis is now a manageable condition. I dare you to read this article about it with dry eyes.

When Dave came back from the FDA advisory committee hearing during the approval process he tearfully described the testimony he witnessed from trial participants begging the FDA to approve the drug so they could continue taking it, so they could see their children grow up. He considered getting Trikafta approved a highpoint of his career.

We in his family, though, remember him for what he gave us personally.

At Colgate, Dave learned to “work hard, play hard.” He adhered to this philosophy for the rest of his life, and passed it on to us.

Around the time I graduated high school, when they moved to better-paying industry jobs, Dave and Victoria moved into a spacious condo a few blocks away from the tiny apartment we had lived in together in Brookline. As they both got better and better jobs, the houses I went to for summer visits and Christmases grew larger and larger. In 2001, they finally “made it official” and got married.

By the time our first child was born, Dave and Victoria had a vacation home in Wareham, MA near the beach, where our “Brady Bunch” family (my mother’s 3 natural children, and Dave’s 3) would meet for a week in the summer and Yuletide. It had lots of bedrooms, a pingpong table in the basement, and a well stocked refrigerator, and it was always a great time.

Dave and G just after installing one of Karen’s works of art at our house.

Eventually, as the grandchildren became more numerous (they now have 13), they relocated to Pembroke, MA, in a big house on the North River (where I am writing this now), and moved their vacation residence to Mount Vernon, WA, on Big Lake, not far from where I was born and my twin brothers live with their families.

Dave was well known for his love of cinema (both classic and recent) and catnaps (and, more than occasionally, combining the two.) He was particularly fond of and expert at trivia, poker, and fantasy sports, and for 20 years was commissioner of the family and friends league I am a member of. Dave also made sure to pass lots of Amato family pastimes on to the next generation, including all-terrian bocce and dice and card games like Onze and Mexican.

Dave loved music, from classic rock to modern stuff. My contribution to the family canon was during grad school, when I introduced them to the Old 97s and Jackie Greene. “I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing” by Aerosmith was “their song”, which  Victoria and Dave played at their wedding. Ever since, putting it on the Sonos was a guaranteed way to make them stop whatever they were doing and dance together.

Dave loved good drink, good food, the occasional cigar, and he especially liked providing these for others. His mainstay cocktail was the Perfect Manhattan. On special occasions, like Christmas morning, he would prepare a huge batch of his Bloody Mary recipe, which remains unmatched in the world. My personal favorite is his recipe for marinated steak tips, which I’ve never been able to reproduce (it requires a cut of steak that seems to only be available in the Boston area, but other cuts still make for a yummy meal).

(Some of) Dave’s family, at Christmas shortly after his diagnosis.

Dave’s legacy is his family and the values he instilled in us, but also…

After being diagnosed with a glioblastoma in 2018, Dave began compiling much of his lifelong wisdom including his favorite films, card and dice games, and food and drink recipes at www.TheBearKnowsBest.com. (Dave was fondly known since his college days and to his family as “The Bear”).

Please go take a look, leave a comment, add some ingredients to your grocery list for a weekend dinner, try out a drink recipe, get some family and friends together and play one of the dice or card games, have a laugh at the funny lists, or get one of his favorite books or movies.

I know he’d appreciate it.

Sometimes when people ask what I do for a living, I tell them I write and answer email.  It certainly is a big part of my day!

That said, I have a pretty good relationship with email. I have a well-managed inbox and occasionally even hit inbox zero, despite getting a lot of emails every day and juggling a lot of responsibilities.

There are a lot of guides out there about how to do this, including this nice Harvard Business Review article on how to have an efficient email session, the “touch it once” philosophy that apparently got its start in the pre-email days, and the original “inbox zero” philosophy that leverages a lot of Gmail features.  My own philosophy borrows a lot from all of these, especially the idea that when you encounter an email you should dispose of it quickly in a way that either gets it off of your desk or puts it where it needs to be for you to act on it.

I know many people with tens of thousands of unread emails, and it’s probably not practical for them to go through and dispose of them all.  For them, I might recommend email bankruptcy: file everything away, start from an empty inbox, and this time don’t let it build up.

I got to this state by building up a lot of good email habits including, counterintuitively, sending myself lots of emails.  Here they are, in case you’d like to try it:

1. Get GMail. It has good filtering, enough storage space for all of your email, a snooze feature, and (and this is key): such good search capabilities that you don’t have to file anything. It has good support for mobile devices, you can configure it for offline use, and the cloud storage means you don’t have to worry too much about backups.
2. Use hotkeys. They save a second per email which really adds up. Have one for archiving, one for spam, one for responding, and one for responding to all.
3. Think of your inbox as your to-do list.  If it’s in your inbox, it’s a short- to medium-term action item. Every email is an item. If you’re not going to do something with it soon, it should not be in your inbox. Keep your list of big and/or long-term projects you’re working on somewhere else.
4. Archive emails immediately after dealing with them. This is how you cross the item off of your to-do list. GMail is also spooky good at giving “nudges” about emails you sent that never got answered, helping you to not lose track of important threads when they leave your inbox.
5. Use snooze a lot. If you don’t need to work on it soon, snooze it until you do need to work on it. That final report due in December? Snooze until late November.  That speaker you need to arrange visits for? Snooze the “yes I can host” email you sent until the week before they arrive. That thing you’re going to buy this weekend? Snooze until Friday afternoon. Don’t have things in your inbox that aren’t potential action items today or very soon.
6. Battle the email monster often and efficiently. I “weed” my inbox many times per day. It’s a constant triage, with every email getting one of three dispositions every time I see it:

   1) deal with it and archive it forever,
   2) snooze it for later, or
   3) decide you’ll deal with it very soon.
   It’s a good way to spend those odd bits of time between meetings or on a bus where you don’t have time to dig into a big project.

7. Send yourself emails. If you have an ongoing thing that you need to have on your to-do list (i.e. in your inbox) and there is no associated email for the next short-term task, make one by sending yourself an email with the task as the subject.
8. Get used to saying “send me an email”. If I’m in a conversation and we generate an action item for me, I make sure there is an email to go with it. You might send it to yourself, you might summarize the conversation at the end in an email to them and you, or (if appropriate) just ask them to send you an email asking for that thing. Now it’s on your to-do list.
9. Expect that you will archive everything. Plan that every single email will eventually get stored away, the sooner the better. It’s not gone; you’ll find it again because you have Google search. If it’s not on your to-do list, archive it.
   [If you really really can’t not file things because you need that level of organization in your mail: use a label+archive hotkey.  Choose a small number of labels (they’re like folders) and file the emails you’re worried you’ll lose appropriately as you archive them. But: you don’t have to label everything.]
10. Learn to use the GMail search bar. You can find emails very quickly if you know how to search on sender, dates, and other nifty keywords. This is key: you need to always be able to find any email without spending a lot of time filing them.
11. Unsubscribe aggressively.  Spam is not to be immediately deleted! Each one is an action item: unsubscribe (if it’s true spam and not just normal marketing you can hit GMail’s “spam” button and better train the AI to keep these out of your inbox in the first place).  Between unsubscribing aggressively and GMail’s spam filter I get very little unwanted mail, which is essential for a well-managed inbox.
12. Filter out the noise. There are emails you need to have and maybe want to read in batches but don’t really need to read every time they arrive. You can filter them to archive and get a label before they ever hit your inbox. When you want to catch up, go to the label and read them at your leisure, but don’t waste a tiny part of each day acting on them. If you’re worried you’ll never get around to reading them if they’re out of sight, send yourself an email to read them! Now they’re just a single line in your inbox, not many.
13. Keep it on the first page. If your inbox exceeds your first page (50 or so) you need to sit down and deal with it. This will make you more productive and help with the feeling of doom that comes from having too many emails. Find what is not important to do this week and snooze it. Archive the stuff you just aren’t ever going to get to (maybe send a “sorry I won’t get to this” email first).  Be realistic about what you’re going to do. Don’t guilt pack emails in your inbox!

That’s how it works for me. I know it’s not for everybody, but hopefully there are some nuggets in there you can use.

As a child, I watched the first two hours of The Sound of Music countless times. We had recorded it off of TV on a VHS top set to short-play mode, and so we only caught the first two hours.  For me, the movie ends with the von Trapps pushing their car away from the house to begin their escape from the Nazis.  I’ve only seen the rest of the movie a few times, as an adult.

As kids, we loved most of the music, we loved the scenes with the kids, we loved “Uncle Max,” and of course we loved Maria.  We generally skipped past the “boring parts” where the adults were talking and “Climb Every Mountain.”  We wanted to see “Do Re Mi” and “Lonely Goatherd”.

My kids have seen it a few times now (2-day rental at the public library) and they love it, too, for the same reasons I did.  But now I love it for different reasons—it’s a rich and brilliant film with lots to offer, much of it contradictory to the reasons I loved it as a child.

Some observations from an adult perspective:

1. 1. The movie downplays the evil of Nazism.
      As a kid, the Nazis are bad because Georg doesn’t like them and they want him to go to Berlin. In real life, the Nazis were evil because they were genocidal. It’s great to teach kids that “Nazis are bad” but watching as an adult you can’t help but think that the the von Trapps’ troubles are trivial compared to what was actually going on.
   2. “Climb Every Mountain” is great.
      The abbess his some pipes.
      
   3. Christopher Plummer was a dish.
      We understand Maria’s attraction to him because of the way the camera treats him as a sex object (for instance using soft focus) in a way modern movies usually reserve for women.
      
   4. Uncle Max is not a good man.
      He makes it clear he’s perfectly happy to collaborate with the Nazis, especially if he’ll make money doing it. The children (in the movie and those watching) love him because he’s so gregarious, but it is only his love for the von Trapps, their money, and Georg’s shaming that makes him help them escape. He doesn’t really deserve the hero status the movie gives him.
      
   5. Baroness Schraeder is not a villain.
      As kids we see only see her as an antagonist because she stands in between Georg and Maria’s love, and we dislike her because we see her scheming with Max about money, because she doesn’t like to play ball, and because she dreams of of putting the kids in boarding school. But as an adult I find her to be a sympathetic character, remarkable for her strength and maturity. A widow, she finds love in Georg, a good and handsome man who loves her for who she is, not for her money. She is desperate for him to marry her, but this is hardly a character flaw for a single, rich, middle-aged European woman in the 1930s. Georg promises the safety, stability, and love we all seek in life. She schemes to get Maria out of the house, yes, but wouldn’t we all in her position? And her schemes are all honest: at end of Act I she truthfully tells Maria Georg is falling in love with her, and Maria follows her calling and leaves the house to pursue her vows. It’s what Maria thinks she wants!And when it all falls apart and Georg is clearly conflicted, she doesn’t fight to the end. She knows when she’s been beaten, and she saves face by ending the relationship before he can say anything, telling him to follow his heart. Georg’s smile as she breaks it off is one of admiration, respect, appreciation, and love. It’s a brilliantly done scene, and as an adult that has loved and lost I find it remarkably moving.
      
   6. Julie Andrews is brilliant.
      Especially thinking about the range revealed by her later roles as mature, stern characters, her innocent, effervescent Maria is just a delight to behold.

7. Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer’s onscreen chemistry is fantastic

I mean come on:

8. Except for Leisl, the kids aren’t actually in this movie much
   They hardly get any actual lines, and are mostly just caricatures. The exception is Leisl’s hard lesson in love with Rolf, which is really well done.

9. “I am Sixteen Going on Seventeen” doesn’t hold up.
   It’s a great song, and a beautifully choreographed sequence that wonderfully captures the unstable mix of love and lust that saturates teenagers, but the sexual politics are so retrograde it’s painful to watch.

10. Mrs. von Trapp looms over the movie
    The children’s mother is rarely mentioned and we learn almost nothing about her except that she loved music and sang to the children with Georg (“I remember, father,” says Leisl, with aching innocence to the pain Georg is in at those words.). As adults and parents we are fascinated: Georg’s retreat into a stern taskmaster is clearly a defense against the pain of his loss; Maria’s music and exuberance clearly reminds him of her. We would understand Georg so much better if we could meet her; instead we barely know of her.
11. Georg is a remarkable man, perfectly portrayed by Plummer
    His fierce morality, unshakable patriotism, strength, and sensitivity shine through the screen. I first saw the “Eidelwiess” scene as an adult, and Plummer nails it, with Georg unable to finish the song until Maria, his children, and the people of Salzburg give him the strength. For me, it’s a highlight of the movie.

It it ethical to be good to your family?

Since the Renaissance, ethics has been a core subject in the humanities, but it has fallen out of the usual core curriculum at liberal arts schools, but Penn State is reviving the tradition. Many faculty at Penn State have taken ethics training via Penn State’s Rock Ethics Institute, which provides a week-long crash course in the basics and helps us integrate ethics into the curriculum.  The aspiration is that all faculty will be trained and all courses will have an ethics component. I think it’s a great project.

This means that I have just enough training in formal ethics to think about the topic as a sort of educated layperson or hobbyist. I find ethics to be a great way to think through problems and interrogate our motives, but not necessarily a way to arrive at the “right” answer to a dilemma: different ethical frameworks can yield different conclusions, as can bringing different values to the problem (but when all frameworks point to the same conclusion, you know you’ve got a robust answer). Some ethical reasoning is also about justifying our guts’ impulses formally, codifying, explaining, and refining peoples’ collective moral compass.

One paradox I struggle with is between our deep, instinctual tendency to treat our friends and loved ones better than others, and the bedrock principles of fairness that underlie most ethical frameworks. Put simply: there are things I would do for my family I would not do for a stranger, and things I’d do for a stranger I would not do for an enemy. How does that fit in with ethical analysis?

When thinking about this, I call it “The Little Principle,” and I consider it axiomatic. Here it is:

It is appropriate to treat some people better than others. Specifically, one should prioritize those to whom one has an emotional bond over others.

or, more simply: “Je suis responsable de ma rose.”

The name comes from The Little Prince, the classic children’s(?) book by Antoine Saint-Exupéry. It is a primary theme of the book, and is captured best in the lesson the fox teaches the little prince:

So the little prince tamed the fox. And when the hour of his departure drew near—

“Ah,” said the fox, “I shall cry.”

“It is your own fault,” said the little prince. “I never wished you any sort of harm; but you wanted me to tame you…”

“Yes, that is so,” said the fox.

“But now you are going to cry!” said the little prince.

“Yes, that is so,” said the fox.

“Then it has done you no good at all!”

“It has done me good,” said the fox, “because of the color of the wheat fields.” And then he added:

“Go and look again at the roses. You will understand now that yours is unique in all the world. Then come back to say goodbye to me, and I will make you a present of a secret.”

---

The little prince went away, to look again at the roses.

“You are not at all like my rose,” he said. “As yet you are nothing. No one has tamed you, and you have tamed no one. You are like my fox when I first knew him. He was only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But I have made him my friend, and now he is unique in all the world.”

And the roses were very much embarrassed.

“You are beautiful, but you are empty,” he went on. “One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you—the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars (except the two or three that we saved to become butterflies); because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose.

---

And he went back to meet the fox.

“Goodbye,” he said.

“Goodbye,” said the fox. “And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

“What is essential is invisible to the eye,” the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember.

“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”

“It is the time I have wasted for my rose—” said the little prince, so that he would be sure to remember.

“Men have forgotten this truth,” said the fox. “But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose…”

“I am responsible for my rose,” the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember.

The book is elliptical and has some odd moral dimensions, but with this theme it nails something important on the head, something both profound and trivial: you treat those you care about better than those you have never met.

It’s easy to get carried away with individual ethical principles, to take your morality to extremes. I’ve written before about the great evil that comes from following your ideas to their logical conclusions (and also about the importance of radicalism to positive political change). Clearly, taking The Little Principle to its extreme leads to a sort of puerile selfishness, where all of our actions are centered around helping ourselves and those in our in-group, at whatever expense to others. Depending on whom we identify with, this can lead to great evils like genocide, and is contrary to the egalitarian principles of law and democracy. The Little Principle needs to sit next to another principle that all humans (and, I’d argue, much life) is entitled to a minimum level of moral standing. The Little Principle is not license to treat others badly.

But the other extreme—that we owe nothing special to our friends and loved ones—is fundamentally contrary to who we are as humans. Indeed, we don’t even restrict this instinct to other people, but it extends to our pets, our environment, and even whole classes of beings we’ve never met (“Save the Whales!”). The Little Principle states that any useful moral framework acknowledges that individuals can prioritize which others they help and care for.

I think one way to thread the needle is to acknowledge that this prioritization is personal, not universal. I treat my children better than yours, but I also expect you to treat yours better than mine. We do have universal moral responsibilities, but we also have relative ones that depend on who we care about. We can build universal legal and moral structures that themselves eschew the Little Principle, while enshrining it at the individual level. We are “a nation of laws, not of men.” A court will impartially defend the rights of any parent to care for their own children.

It’s an interesting and nuanced issue!

SETI has a jargon problem. This is not news; I think everyone in the field appreciates that we need to be more consistent in the words we use.

One reason this matters is that the search for alien technology is really a very broad endeavor (best thought of, I have argued, as a subfield within astrobiology). It includes not just radio astronomy  but infrared astronomy, optical and NIR instrumentation, exoplanets, Earth system science, game theory, social sciences such as anthropology, galactic astrophysics, stellar astrophysics, time-domain astronomy, computer science, multi-messenger astronomy, planetary science, remote sensing, media and communications, law, and political science.

These fields all have their own jargon, and if we want them to be part of SETI we should avoid misappropriating their jargon.  For instance “civilization” has concrete and jargon meaning in anthropology and archaeology. I imagine anthropologists at our meetings wincing every time we use the term in a very different (vaguer, more generic) way than they do.

Indeed, “intelligence” itself is problematic and not an ideal term. The term is nebulous (is an ostrich intelligent? Is a bee colony?) but also presumes much about how an alien species’ psychology works.

Why shouldn’t we assume aliens will be “intelligent” or have “civilizations”? As many have noted, we should not assume that the first extraterrestrial technological species we discover is anything like us: it might not be a collective of individuals, might not be “conscious” in the way we are, might not organize itself with anything like politics, might not be animal, might not be planet-based, etc. etc. etc. Science fiction is filled with potential SETI signals of things that look nothing like “civilizations”, from Hoyle’s Black Cloud to the Borg to the Monolith.

Even more than being careful in not misusing established terms, many have noted that we use many of our own terms inconsistently (Iván Almár has been particularly persuasive on this point, and I’m certainly guilty on this score.)

So, as part of the SETI Institute’s Decoding Alien Intelligence workshop this month and in response to Nathalie Cabrol’s call for white papers an broadening our conception of SETI, I submitted something about how we think about SETI as a field and the jargon we use.

Thank you to all our participants in this week's #DecodingIntelligence workshop! We hope you enjoyed the talks, the people, and the Institute. Come back soon! pic.twitter.com/pwO06f0snu

— The SETI Institute (@SETIInstitute) March 17, 2018

I couldn’t make it, but Penn State graduate student Sofia Sheikh went and presented the paper for me.

"Taxonomy and Jargon in SETI as an Interdisciplinary Field of Study" from @Astro_Wright – presented by Sofia Sheikh. #DecodingIntelligence (PDF: https://t.co/hXdiN0y5V0) pic.twitter.com/VqDRscTHzU

— M.P. (@OmanReagan) March 15, 2018

My recommendations:

First of all, the field needs a name. The term SETI has variously been used to refer strictly to radio searches, specific NASA programs, to any search for communication, and broader searches, and has been used both to include and to distinguish from efforts such as searches for artifacts.

I agree with Almár that SETI should be the name of the entire field. One problem is that this it includes “intelligence”, which I have just argued is not a good term, but I feel that “SETI” is such a strong “brand” at this point—such a well-known and widely used term—that I think it is best to use it in a jargon sense of “whatever distinguishes technological species from other species that makes them easier to detect because of their technology”.  A rebranding is very unlikely to be successful (I would support it if everyone agreed to start using a single better term).

Having adopted “SETI” as the name of the field because of something like stare decisis, it follows that the term “ETI” is what we are looking for, again in a jargon sense.

I also like Almár’s definition ““the collective name of a number of activities, based on science, aimed to detect messages, signals or traces” of extraterrestrial intelligence.

I also really like the term technosignatures (whose origin I’ve been trying to track down, see this tweet:)

The earliest use I have in my notes is @jilltarter (2006) https://t.co/BGHXp4EbEb

— Space Archaeology 🌈 (@spacearcheology) March 17, 2018

But again, we use it inconsistently.  I prefer the term to include any technological signature, including communication, both because that is the term’s natural meaning and because the contrast with biosignatures helps identify SETI’s place within astrobiology

I like to divide SETI into several classes, including communication SETI and artifact SETI, being the searches for deliberately transmitted information carriers and the effect of technology on the environment.  Other terms for the latter abound (technomarkers, Dysonian SETI, SETA…) and we should settle on one.

Within artifact SETI then there are lots of ways of searching: waste-heat SETI, probe SETI, Solar System SETI, and so on.

METI or active-SETI would also then constitute a subclass of SETI.

Paul Davies coined the term “nature-plus” which is the best term I’ve seen to describe the idea that alien technology could be so advanced that it will look like a force of nature; this could include contamination of stellar abundances, artificially modulated Cepheid variable stars, or even something like Hoyle’s Black Cloud.  It’s not exactly what Davies intended, but its the best label I could find for this kind of search.

Finally, I think it’s important to define a beacon as a signal or artifact meant to be discovered by strangers. The term has been used in other ways, but this is the term’s most natural meaning, and helps us identify which sorts of signal searches can be informed by the concept of a Schelling point. The latter term has many many names in the filed (“strategy of mutual search”, “convergent search strategies,” “attractor for SETI”, “synchrosignals”) generated as people rediscover Schelling’s insight, but we should honor game theory’s prior art here and recognize the value of needing to think about assumptions of common knowledge that we make when looking for “magic frequencies” and such.

Finally, we should avoid terms like “colonize” and “alien race” because of the social baggage they bring along. (This is not because I think we should be PC, but because we should be precise: if you really do mean to project our notions of colonization and race onto alien species with whom we share no evolutionary descent, much less culture, then by all means use those terms).

So that’s my reasoning and set of preferences for jargon, but I recognize this needs to be a collective decision in the community, and I suspect that the final answer will arise collectively and organically, and not by fiat.  Already we’ve received good feedback (CETI is probably its own category, distinct from METI, as Jill Tarter pointed out; “artificial” is a difficult and probably problematic term we should define better, as Frank Drake has pointed out).

Anyway, I think Sofia’s presentation will be public at some point, and the paper is available here at the conference website, and an updated version with the figure below is on the arXiv here.

SETI as Astrobiology-t593u0