From Smoke to Campfire: Reimagining Technosignatures Through Indigenous Knowledge ✛
Context
In 1960, the Tatel radio telescope spent weeks listening to two stars: Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani. Thus began the search for technosignatures. Decades later, after the discovery of thousands of exoplanets by the Kepler mission led by William Borucki, we still hear no alien voices. An arsenal of hypothesized signatures has emerged: from radio transmissions to megastructures that block starlight. They share a common feature: deviations from the natural background. A smoke detector spots a fire but misses the hearth warming the home. Isn't our toolkit too focused on catastrophes?
Methods
The author draws on the work of Indigenous scholars and contrasts two epistemologies. Western science seeks objective truth, divides knowledge into disciplines, and places humans above nature. Indigenous methods (specifically Mi’kmaw) view nature as kinship, knowledge as responsibility, and link the celestial and earthly by the principle ‘as above, so below.’ From this standpoint, a technology that is an equal among equals would not noticeably distort the environment. Applying this lens to technosignatures, it becomes clear: we are searching not just for a signal, but for a colonial scar.
Results
It turns out that nearly all known technosignatures—from industrial gases in atmospheres to artificial objects in the interstellar medium—are forms of pollution. And pollution, as Indigenous thought observes, is colonization. Thus, SETI unwittingly selects only those civilizations that replicate the Western developmental path. History offers a lesson: when Jocelyn Bell Burnell detected the periodic pulses of the first pulsar, their natural origin was initially dismissed, dubbed LGM-1—‘little green men.’ We are programmed to see anomalies as someone’s handiwork. But what if the most sustainable societies leave no such anomalies? Their biosignatures might smoothly amplify the natural background rather than compete with it. This resolves the Fermi Paradox: loud species quickly go extinct or fall silent, while quiet ones remain unnoticed.
Implications
For the science of technosignatures, this means decolonization is necessary—a shift from detecting smoke to detecting the campfire. Instead of asking ‘where is something wrong?’ we should ask ‘where is everything too harmonious?’ Such technology would not disrupt the natural balance but become part of it. We will need to revise detection criteria and develop methods to pick up faint but persistent signals from civilizations that respect their planet.
Future development
A practical step could be the philosophy of ‘Two-Eyed Seeing,’ uniting Western and Indigenous perspectives. Researchers could use numerical simulations to recreate scenarios of non-disruptive development and predict their signatures in data. This will require new signal processing algorithms sensitive to slow trends rather than sharp bursts.
Impact
Reimagining technosignatures will influence astrobiology, philosophy of science, and sustainability debates, prompting us to see cosmic civilizations not as conquerors but as co-inhabitants.
Next steps
We need to develop theoretical models of technosignatures compatible with an Indigenous perspective and assess their observational manifestations in exoplanet atmospheres and the interstellar medium using data from ongoing surveys.
Key open problems
The article directly links the Fermi Paradox to cultural biases in technosignatures and uncovers the problem of detectability of non-polluting technologies, intersecting with questions of civilization sustainability in the context of stellar evolution and galactic ecology.
The knowledge machine's view
This section is addressed to the author of the paper and their colleagues. Neighbouring works were found by meaning-based search across our archive, not by word overlap. We do not review: we show the field around the work.
What the work does
The paper proposes rethinking the search for technosignatures through the lens of Indigenous knowledge: current methods look for deviations from the natural background, which is essentially a search for pollution, and pollution is viewed as a form of colonization. The author compares Western science with Indigenous epistemologies, showing that sustainable civilizations may not leave noticeable anomalies, and suggests looking for harmonious rather than destructive technologies.
Where its strength is
The strength of the work lies in shifting the focus from searching for anomalies to searching for harmony, which opens up a new class of signatures—weak and long-lasting, rather than catastrophic. This expands the conceptual framework of SETI and offers a concrete criterion: instead of asking 'where is something wrong?', ask 'where is everything too harmonious?'.
Where it could go next
- It might be interesting to see how the proposed approach relates to the search for ancient civilizations via cosmic dust: if sustainable societies leave few traces, their technosignatures could be even more subtle than dust.based on: Hunting Ancient Civilizations Through Cosmic Dust arXiv:2606.08373
- A related idea is to search for alien probes by the shadow they cast on Earth: harmonious civilizations might not send large artifacts but could use passive observers that are harder to spot.based on: Earth's Shadow Hunts for Alien Probes arXiv:2510.17907
- Our archive contains a piece on what we miss in the search for aliens: it could provide additional examples of non-anomalous signatures that align with the idea of a campfire rather than smoke.based on: Traces of Mind: What We Miss in the Search for Aliens arXiv:2606.28437
Worth trying
- Try to develop a metric of signal 'harmoniousness' that assesses how well it fits into the natural background rather than standing out from it.
- Test whether weak but persistent changes in exoplanet atmospheres—changes that do not constitute pollution but rather stabilize the climate—can be detected.
- Use citizen science approaches, as in the work on volunteers, to search for such subtle signatures in large datasets.
Why this may matter
This could broaden the search space for extraterrestrial intelligence to include civilizations that do not follow the Western path of development. If such civilizations exist, current methods would miss them, and this proposed paradigm shift could be key to resolving the Fermi paradox.
Nearby works in our archive
- Hunting Ancient Civilizations Through Cosmic Dustsimilarity 0.66
- Earth's Shadow Hunts for Alien Probessimilarity 0.62
- Search for alien radio signals along the planetary planesimilarity 0.60
- The Last Cry of an Alien Civilizationsimilarity 0.59
- Alien Radio Hum: How to Eavesdrop on Distant Civilizationssimilarity 0.59
- Catching a Sunset on a Distant Planetsimilarity 0.58
- Traces of Mind: What We Miss in the Search for Alienssimilarity 0.57
The closest work in the archive sits at 0.66 by meaning — the usual level for our corpus.
Original abstract
as written by the authors arXiv:2607.07592
There exist numerous proposals for potential technosignatures that we can search for, but they all tend to be deviations from possible naturally occurring signals. That is, technosignatures tend to be a search for pollution. Following a number of works by Indigenous scholars, pollution is colonization, even if that pollution is lightyears away. In this situations we are searching for colonial societies that are a reflection of colonial societies on Earth. This may help explain the Fermi Paradox. We are searching for systems that are highly polluting and potentially destructive, while we do not search for extraterrestrial societies that are less impactful on their celestial environment. This also suggests that we might consider technosignatures that act to support natural environments and might be more closely related to biosignatures, that is a technology that reflects a supportive relationship with nature.
The first pulsar, discovered by Jocelyn Bell Burnell in 1967, was initially labeled LGM-1 (‘little green men’)—so strong was the expectation that any deviation from nature must be artificial.
Key numbers
- Year Ozma project began: 1960
- Number of stars in Ozma project: 2
- Confirmed exoplanets as of 2026: over 5500
- Duration of Ozma project: about 150 hours
- First Dyson sphere publication: 1960