When I was intelligence Officer, we had a saying about looking for “bad guys” in terrorist networks: “Don’t just look for your lost keys under a lamp post.” This means don’t limit your search for truth to places where it’s easy to search, especially where you want and expect evidence, or where your cognitive biases blind you.(1)
Another important concept we are taught is “Beware of the mirror”: that is, it is dangerous to think that a foreign actor has the same imagination and motivation as we do. For example, foreign intelligence officers may engage in cyber hacking for personal financial gain as well as to gather intelligence, something that US officers – except in very rare cases – never do. Thus, a particular hack by a particular foreign adversary may or may not be of official interest in the hacking target.
To avoid the pitfalls of “lamp setting” and “mirror,” we have sometimes found success using the concept of negative space, where we clearly list our assumptions, desires, biases, and beliefs, then point out that the answer to the intelligence question lies only in negative space. did not wait where are we? did not want, for the reasons we want never to dream.(1)
Inside me recent UFO research work with my wife, Psychology today blogger Chris Gilbert MD PhD (cast member in TV series Foreign files have been reopened), I realized that when people search for ET signals from deep space, they may be missing evidence that distant ETs are looking in our faces due to “flashlighting” and “mirroring”.
Why studying negative space is so important to studying space
Searchers for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) often attribute their failure to detect ETs to a needle problem: the search for ET based on all combinations of location in the sky, time of day, signal bands (radio, optical, X-ray, etc.), signal type (single tone, bursts, repetitive, non-repetitive), is huge. optimistically, only 0.0000000000000000000001 covered the possibilities.
So, SETI experts say, we shouldn’t expect success any faster than we expect to grab a glass of water at random from the ocean and catch a fish. For these reasons, SETI research typically hunts for “low-hanging fruit,” which includes artificial narrow-band radio signals (as distinct from the broadband astronomical background radiation), non-random, man-made signals, signals in favorable microwave bands, abnormally repetitive signals, and non-terrestrial signals. (2) We’ve barely scratched the surface with these “exact” searches, so why waste scarce resources on human-expected negative space?
It’s a valid question, given that studying unexpected parts of the astronomical electromagnetic spectrum, such as the X-ray, infrared, visible, gamma-ray, and terahertz bands, requires building and operating very expensive sensor networks with no expectation of success.
But to discover ETs, the concept of negative space can be very useful for analyzing the data we have. already assembled.
Indeed, NASA and others are increasingly providing non-SETI astronomy and astrophysics data to SETI researchers. But most of these datasets collected to explain natural phenomena have clearly filtered out artificial-looking signals (which may be the most promising) and compressed other signals for efficient storage, which can remove important information.
Thus, the pursuit of a negative space concept in SETI must include giving SETI researchers full access to pre-filtered, pre-compressed non-SETI data.
It is equally important to look directly at the “reverse” data set. opposite SETI researchers today typically use data analysis methods including:
- Broadband “noisy” astronomical signals may not be natural upon closer inspection
- Unrepeatable signals
- Very slow signals (on the order of years or decades between repetitions). Recent analysis of telescope images from the 1950s, for example, shows unexplained very short pulses in the sky that predate satellites (sometimes by years).
- Very fast pulses (less than a nanosecond)
- Parts of the spectrum, such as X-rays and gamma rays, we do not use for communication.
- Using sequences that do not derive from exact mathematics, such as prime numbers, Fibonacci series, etc.
- “Natural” signals such as fast radio bursts, pulsars and quasars, on closer inspection, can be artificially modulated in some way.
Fortunately, SETI researchers have already begun to look for such signals in astronomical data (3). Of course, hunting for new types of “needles” in the huge “haystack” of non-SETI data does not guarantee success,
But if researchers switch from looking for needles in haystacks to hunting for a few haystacks in needle mountains, the odds of success may improve.
