Sophia Sheikh
SAG 25: Technosignatures

Great. Hello everyone.
I'm very excited to be here.
This is my first exopag and I've taken a bunch of notes so far.
Learned a lot of interesting things, so I'm looking forward to the rest of the meeting as well.
And today I'm going to be presenting on, I think the second newest SAG, which is SAG 25 on techno signatures.
Yeah.
So I'll start out with a brief introduction to the topic of techno signatures. This has been sort of my research focus for my PhD through my postdoc, but I know that it is sort of a maybe newer, unfamiliar jargon word to some of you here in the AUD.
Once.
So here when I say techno signature, I mean an astronomically observable trace of technologically capable life in the universe.
And as you might kind of figure from that definition, this works a sort of a subcategory of biosignatures. So often if we think about remotely detectable biosignatures, something like.
A molecule that would be detectable in an exoplanet's atmosphere.
That's often going to be due to, say, the metabolism or metabolic processes of some life that could be present on that planet.
For techno signatures, a lot of the same detection techniques might be used to, depending on the signature.
But we're not necessarily so tied to the metabolism of life or an Organism, but instead signatures of the technology that that life may have created, just like we have done to the surface of the Earth, and indeed our solar system.
So as I've mentioned, as far as methods go for this kind of work, some methods are almost directly analogous to what a lot of you are doing for biosignature detection with upcoming missions.
So for us that might look like searching for traces of industrially produced chlorofluorocarbons, or CF Cs in exoplanet atmospheres.
But technology takes a wide range of forms.
In the ways that it presents on our planet and so other techno signatures.
Things like narrowband radio emission are not quite so analogous to some of the techniques that are generally used for other exoplanet biosignatures.
I'd like to highlight if we go back to this definition of astrobiology that looking for technologically capable life really broadens what's possible if we want to understand the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe.
And I think you really need technosignature work to fill in the complete picture if you're looking especially at these last two factors.
How life might move or spread through the Galaxy.
And also what life's impact on the Galaxy Observably would be?
Over long time scales.
So with these things in mind, last year we started the techno signature SAG 25 and I'll give you a disclaimer here. We've been working on this SAG since kick off for about two months over the holiday period. So this might be sort of a short and brief.
Talk and introduction to what we hope to do over the coming year, but our mission statement includes sort of the following goals that I'll go over in brief.
We want to investigate which techno signature projects and methodology methodologies should play a role in NASA's portfolio.
We will identify the most promising technosignature investigations to prioritize for further development.
We'll identify science and technology gaps relevant to techno signature searches, similar to some of the other technology gap lists that you've heard talked about today.
Want to identify existing NASA programs?
Most relevant to techno signature searches and determine how they can be more responsive to people proposing for those searches.
And along similar lines, identify best practices for NASA program officers and review panellists to evaluate techno signature proposals.
This could be in programs like XRP or generally across other programs and even divisions because as with astrobiology, technosignature research is an extremely broad and interdisciplinary endeavor.
And our final goal is to identify potential new initiatives to build community and inter communications with other astrobiology efforts.
I think there's a lot that the techno signature community can learn from and also contribute to a lot of existing efforts that have been mentioned within the ExoPAG and outside of it.
So in order to accomplish this rather broad and lofty set of goals, I'm thankfully not doing this alone, but instead have my wonderful steering committee who I'm showing here on the slide helping me out.
With this task, so we have a broad range of expertise, both on the exoplanet and non exoplanet sides.
And so far, we've seen pretty enthusiastic community response for the creation of this SAG.
So to go into a little bit of the bureaucratic details here.
The leads that I showed on the last slide, we have 9 total leads on the steering committee, two of which are early career Executive secretaries who are helping with the organization and participating in.
The structure of the SAG.
And we sent out an open call to the community, which resulted in a total of 74 SAG members, again across a range of career stages, subfields and institutions.
And one of the first tasks that we did was to break up that membership into smaller working groups.
So we have two large working groups, one on exoplanetary techno signatures and another on non exoplanet techno signatures. And those two groups will encompass the first four goals that I showed you on the previous slide.
And then we have two smaller working groups on proposal review and astrobiology integration, which are a little bit more about the.
How to implement the?
Recommendations that could come out of the first two working groups.
So this does an illustration of this.
We have our SAG generally are four working groups and it's worth highlighting that there's going to be a lot of overlap between our working groups. And so we're trying to set up a structure in which intercommunication between these working groups is encouraged and we have Members that can.
Kind of move fluidly between those groups because there are many members with expertise that are that's going to be helpful.
Across those boundaries. So trying not to keep this too rigid.
As I mentioned, we just got started, so I don't have too many results for you.
I'll show you a couple toward the end of this talk.
But our kickoff was in quarter four of last year. So in November, we held our kickoff meeting and now we're in quarter 1 2025. The working groups are having their initial meetings and beginning their work on producing materials and section drafts for our final report and.
We expect that to go through kind of the latter half of the year with those smaller working groups finishing their work a little earlier.
And then the steering committee will synthesize all of those individual working group reports into a final synthesis report for exopag, hopefully towards the beginning of 2026.
So fingers crossed I'll be able to come back and tell you about how we accomplished all these wonderful goals in about a year's time.
In the meantime, however, we have been kind of getting off to a pretty exciting start.
We have been organizing techno signature related responses to the Naas Adairs RFI, which you heard some about this morning.
So this wasn't in our initial charter, but we're sort of jumping on the opportunity now that it's come up and keeping track of techno signature related responses to the RFI to sort of organize and make sure all aspects of our community are represented in those white papers.
We're also leading a white paper of our own.
So the SAG 25 Steering Committee is writing a techno signatures omnibus submission to the dares RFI. And our goal here is that this document will serve as a motive.
And for the inclusion of techno signatures in dares as well as an omnibus of all of the other white papers, that sort of spreadsheet that I briefly showed on the last slide.
And also a hub for recent technosignature literature reports and workshop reports and other resources as the community has been very, very active in the last couple years.
And there are a lot of sort of important documents talking about where the future of the field might go, how technosignatures might integrate into NASA missions, like a lot of this work actually has been started in various community forums, and we want to make sure that that is.
Shared and available to resource for the dares RFI.
And as a final example of sort of what we have been up to for the last couple months, I'm highlighting an activity that work in Group 3 is undertaking.
So this is the proposal review working group, which is the one that I'm leading and we are beginning our exploration of how techno signature proposals are reviewed and how they could be better integrated by identifying any Rosa's proposal in the last 10 years in any division that.
Might be relevant to techno signature science.
So as you can imagine.
The spreadsheet is very large and it's going to be quite a task, but doing this in sort of this objective measured way with a rubric to keep track of which submissions maybe should be responsive or could be responsive to techno signature proposals and then providing guidance on how.
Those proposals should be reviewed and what the priorities of the Community are.
So with that, I'll quickly summarize what we have been up to this year is that we formed or I guess last year at this point.
We have an established mission statement and list of goals. We formalized our steering committee.
We held an open call for membership and accepted members to participate, and at this point I'll pause and say if this sounds interesting to you, whether you have done any work in the field of techno signatures or not, please come talk to me.
We're still looking for more people to participate.
Bringing in more expertise and we'd be really excited to have you. So while the formal call for membership went out, I think in summer last year, if you're interested, definitely come talk to me and I'd love to help you get involved.
We've also decided on our working group structure and membership.
Held our kick off meeting two months ago.
And now we're holding our initial working group meetings and starting to undertake those individual working group goals. And in the meantime, we're leading and organising submissions for the nasdares RFI.
So with that, if anyone has any questions please let me know, but thank you so much for your attention.
There any questions for Sofia?
Yeah. So I was wondering if you can tell us a bit more about the difference between exoplanet versus non exoplanet techno signatures.
What is the difference?
I'll go ahead and say these are completely arbitrary categories.
So this is not something that, like the field, has a sharp division.
We just needed to break up the work into two working groups. In general, there has been growing interest, of course, over the last decade or two in ways that we might be able to identify the presence of techn.
Technology on exoplanets in anything from direct imaging to Spectra to radio signals, and so anything that is sort of affiliated with a planetary surface or atmosphere and observations we can take of a planet would be in that category.
Everything else that could include technologies way beyond what we've developed on Earth.
Or maybe just large radio transmitters in a solar system?
Something like that could be non exoplanetary.
But we mostly the did this to provide a nice division of expertise.
And workload, and there's certainly some grey area between those categories.
Hey, Sophia.
Rachel Harris HQ, This is really awesome.
So kudos to you and inside 25 for, you know, putting the hard work into this.
I'm really excited to see what you'll be submitting to dares.
My question is kind of about how and maybe we can talk offline about this about, you know, making sure that the the work that the SAG is going to be doing throughout 2025 is you're not having to reinvent the wheel twice, right?
And and so how you can incorporate your your working groups efforts throughout the year also integrating it well with in the new DARES strategy document so.
Let's chat.
Yes, that sounds great.
We're sort of scrambling to get white papers in, which is a good start, but I think given the timelines, other activities throughout the year would be super helpful.
I think that's all the time we have for questions.
So let's thank Sophia again.