Robert Griffin · Dxtra Inc. (dxtra.com) · September 2026
A new way to search for signs of other intelligence — what we looked for, what we found (nothing yet), and why the "nothing" is worth having.
Instead of listening for a transmitter somewhere out there, look at what our own star already broadcasts — its light, its wind, its particles — and ask whether anything has been quietly written into it.
Redistributing vs. generating light — Making a star 0.0001% brighter would take more power than a civilization has. But blocking or redirecting a sliver of light with a large, thin structure costs area, not power. That is the physical loophole the whole idea rests on.
A sender who has never met us cannot say "3 meters" or "5 seconds" — we share no rulers or clocks. All they can send are ratios: this divided by that. So we only search for patterns in ratios of things we measure. That turns an infinite search into a countable one.
A frugal sender will not pay to talk to someone who cannot answer. So the message is locked behind a puzzle: easy to pose, hard to solve, trivial to check — the same logic as a CAPTCHA, or a bank's proof-of-work. Solve it and you have proven you are worth talking to.
find candidate stars from afar; scatter passive listening posts across the galaxy
robotic probes ride shared carrier craft; each leaves a modulator high in a star's atmosphere
a tiny pattern in the star's light — the only step we can test from here
builds archives and computers, notices the puzzle, finds the pattern
decoding the pattern is the proof; the listener must build its own transmitter to answer
it verifies the reply and sends the next stage — a dictionary first, then content
The economics — The sender pays once, up front, for everything on its side. Every listener pays for its own half — and only after it has proven it can. No energy is ever spent on someone who could not answer.
Coverage — the fraction of a defined search space actually examined. Reporting it is what makes a 'we found nothing' worth something: nothing where, to what depth.
| what we looked at | how many searches | data used | result |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fast changes in the Sun's light (minutes) | 14 | NASA GOES satellites, ESA/NASA SOHO, ground radio and cosmic-ray stations | nothing found; two tests judged unreliable |
| Slow changes (days to decades) | 10 | total brightness, radio flux, sunspots, solar-wind composition | nothing found |
| Does it depend on where you stand? | 4 | Earth-orbit satellites vs. a NASA orbiter at Mars | nothing found — a first-of-its-kind test |
| Outer solar system | 1 | Voyager | nothing found |
| A known signal, as a check | 1 | the Sun's own 5-minute "ringing" | found, exactly as physics predicts |
Thirteen of the "nothing found" results come with a measured depth: we injected fake signals and confirmed the method would have caught them. A search that cannot demonstrate that is not counted.
Twenty-five 'nothing found' results are only meaningful if the detector works. Adding fake signals proves it catches shapes we chose. Recovering a real, predicted signal proves it catches nature's shapes too. That is the difference between 'we saw nothing' and 'there was nothing to see at this depth'.
Every test came with a place the signal cannot be — chosen by physics, not by us: above the Sun's acoustic cutoff, at the ecliptic pole, at a frequency mirror-imaged to the real one. Two exciting 'detections' died this way, including one that looked like a 5-sigma result.
When a detector failed its own checks we reported no answer at all. A 'nothing found' from a broken detector would quietly inflate our coverage figure, so it is a separate category.
Every wrong number caught before publication is listed in the paper with what caught it: limits reported as verified before verification; a threshold set so low it could never fire; a control that could not fail. Each was found by checking, not by looking.
Sigma (σ) — a measure of how unlikely a result is by chance. 5σ is the physicist's usual bar for 'discovery' — and it is not enough if the control next door scores 6.6σ, as one of ours did.
The Mars instrument is a small space-weather monitor, 580 times noisier than the Earth one. The next step is NASA's STEREO spacecraft, which has watched the Sun from other angles since 2007 with far better data.
Why the network matters — Without it a reply would go to the sender's home, thousands of light-years away — a wait of thousands of years. With it, the conversation runs at the distance of the nearest post. The chart shows how the wait grows as posts are spaced farther apart.
| What NASA's 2018 technosignature workshop asked for | What this work does |
|---|---|
| Look beyond radio — optical, infrared, artifacts, atmospheres | Does not pick a channel at all; any ratio of measurements is admitted |
| Use existing data and missions | 29 searches, all on public archives collected for other reasons; zero telescope time |
| Develop anomaly detection — look for the unexplained | A systematic anomaly search with a stated denominator and matched statistical controls |
| Measure completeness — how much of the haystack was searched | Extends the haystack to a new axis: combinations of quantities, and instrument continuity |
| Target other star systems | Targets our own Sun — where the archives are. The method is not solar and can be applied to other stars |
| — | New: a capability-gated message, and computing power as the gate |
Report coverage over quantities and their combinations, with a stated denominator. Any team with rich monitoring of any star can use it. Include whether instruments have been kept running — a gap is a permanent hole.
Search fast-changing solar data at its best timescale (a 245× gain sitting on disk). Reconnect retired instruments to their successors. Prefer the Sun's faint, high-atmosphere colors over its total brightness — that is where a frugal designer would write.
A message locked behind capability shares the 'zoo hypothesis' prediction — silence until we are ready — but needs no one to agree, enforce, or abstain. And it predicts the message is already here, not withheld. That is testable.
Zoo hypothesis — the older idea that advanced civilizations exist but deliberately stay quiet, like zookeepers. It requires everyone to cooperate forever; this idea requires nothing of anyone.
Paper, code and the audit of every number: see the repository named in the paper · Robert Griffin · Dxtra Inc.