The Origin of Technosignatures

scientificamerican.com

14 points·LinuxBender··5 comments

Read like a literary peace than a scientific one. I understood that dataome is a "very provocative", "intimate and inextricable" concept, but not what it actually is.

I think that was somewhat intentional, but my take: "Dataome" = technology as an environment/medium.

We live in a world full of microbes and can't function without them. (microbiome)

We live in a world full of technologies and can't function without them. (dataome)

To entertain the thought, technology is in similar status as living things, it reproduces and evolves and affects everything around.

(similar: "memes" are said to have traits of "viruses")

That's actually a very interesting concept (although the word "dataome" is IMO a terrible descriptor) and one that is fun to explore.

I think that all endeavors of living organisms inherit the dynamic and balance seeking properties of the Darwinian phenomenon that gives rise to them, and I think that the fundamentals of it go largely over our heads. Exploring technology as an emergent phenomenon within a Darwinian system is very intriguing.

The piece is only content marketing for a book. An astrobiologist looking for technosignatures and making up technobabble on the go - the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.

Maybe, but the technobabble inspires exploring pretty fun concepts, one example would be we tend to think of technology as something humans do, but really humans are specimens within a spontaneously emerging system and our subjectivity prevents us from constantly being cognizant of that, so really technology emerged spontaneously from the biosphere itself, we are just the mechanism by which that happened.

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