Michael Kraft

Posted on Feb 11 • Originally published at Medium

Maybe SETI Is Listening on the Wrong Timescale

#seti #space #science #discuss

Maybe SETI Is Listening on the Wrong Timescale

A speculative reflection on temporal robustness, time-integrated detection, filtering, and the persistence of technosignatures — from the perspective of a software developer

I’m not an astrophysicist.

I’m not a radio astronomer.

I’m not a SETI researcher.

I’m a developer.

What follows is not a formal scientific claim.

It’s a long chain of thoughts that emerged from looking at SETI through a mindset shaped by systems design, reliability, fault tolerance, signal filtering, and time.

It may be wrong.

It may even be a little crazy.

But interesting ideas often start exactly there.

The original intuition: does safety require time?

One simple thought kept coming back to me:

If information is meant to be safe, robust, and able to survive for a very long time,

doesn’t it usually require more time?

As a developer, this feels familiar.

Reliable systems often trade:

speed for stability
throughput for redundancy
instant results for long-term guarantees

But the more I examined this idea, the more I realized something subtle:

More time does not automatically mean slower transmission.

In information theory, three variables are independent:

transmission duration
data rate
total information content

You can:

send the same data quickly or slowly
repeat signals across long time spans
encode information into structures instead of streams

So the deeper question isn’t about speed.

It’s about whether information survives time.

That shift—from rate to persistence—is where this reflection truly begins.

SETI’s hidden systems assumption: simultaneity

Looking at classical SETI from a systems perspective, something stands out.

Historically, SETI searches for:

narrowband radio signals
continuous or repeating transmissions
observation windows of minutes, hours, or years

Implicitly, this assumes a kind of synchronous protocol:

The sender and receiver must exist at the same time.

In distributed systems, we know how fragile synchrony is.

Across cosmic timescales, it feels even more fragile.

Civilizations might:

emerge and disappear within a few thousand years
change technologies rapidly
never overlap in time at all

Even if intelligent life is common, temporal misalignment alone could explain silence.

So the real systems question becomes:

What if SETI’s main bottleneck isn’t spatial distance—

but temporal synchronization?

From messaging systems to durable storage

In software architecture, when synchronization is unreliable, we shift strategies.

We move from:

real-time communication to
persistent storage and eventual discovery

Translated to SETI, this suggests a different focus:

Instead of signals meant to be received now,

we might expect technosignatures designed to last:

artifacts orbiting stars
atmospheric industrial traces
megastructures radiating waste heat
ultra-stable beacons repeating for millions of years

This is no longer a model of conversation.

It’s a model of durability.

SETI stops looking like a phone call

and starts looking like cosmic archaeology.

Temporal robustness of technosignatures

From a reliability-engineering mindset, a key concept emerges:

Temporal Robustness

Temporal robustness is the ability of a technosignature to remain detectable for a duration

far longer than the civilization that created it survives.

This leads to a simple hypothesis:

The probability of detecting extraterrestrial technology depends more on how long its technosignatures persist than on how efficiently they transmit information.

Or shorter:

Detection scales with persistence, not speed.

For a developer, this feels intuitive:

Logs outlive processes
Databases outlive services
File formats outlive software stacks

Persistence beats performance when time becomes extreme.

Filtering, noise, and the signals we might ignore

Here a more subtle thought appears—one that comes directly from signal processing and software systems.

In most technical systems, we aggressively remove:

noise
interference
low-frequency drift
irregular asynchronous disturbances

Because they are assumed to be meaningless.

Radio astronomy and SETI must also filter enormous amounts of:

cosmic background noise
instrumental artifacts
terrestrial interference
slow or irregular variations

But this raises a speculative question:

What if some forms of what we call noise are actually

extremely long, weak, asynchronous signals?

Not strong enough to stand out.

Not structured enough in short windows.

Not aligned with expected modulation schemes.

Only visible through very long observation

—or perhaps hidden precisely because filtering removes them.

This is not a claim.

Just a systems-level doubt:

Are we sometimes filtering for clarity,

when we should be searching for persistence?

The low-frequency thought experiment — and its real lesson

One speculative direction I considered was extremely low-frequency signals:

enormous wavelengths
slow variation
potential long-term stability

Physics makes this difficult:

interstellar plasma absorption
ionospheric shielding
massive antenna requirements
extremely low bandwidth

So ultra-low-frequency communication is probably not efficient

and may not propagate well across interstellar space.

But the important realization is this:

The key idea is not low frequency itself.

The key idea is signals that survive long enough to be found.

Time-integrated detection: when faint persistence becomes visible

In astronomy and signal processing, a weak signal can emerge if we:

observe long enough
stack data across years or decades
integrate faint periodic or quasi-periodic patterns

Which suggests a powerful possibility:

The most important technosignatures might not be the loudest,

but the ones that are extremely faint, asynchronous, and persistent.

In simple terms:

Time can substitute for signal strength.

A civilization might therefore design signals that are:

weak but continuous
simple but ultra-stable
indistinguishable from noise in short windows
detectable only through long-term integration

This aligns directly with temporal robustness.

A systems-level reframing of SETI

All of this points toward a broader architectural shift:

From communication-centric to persistence-centric SETI

Communication-centric thinking asks:

Who is transmitting right now?
On which frequency?
With what encoding?

Persistence-centric thinking asks instead:

What survives for millions of years?
What looks like noise until observed long enough?
What leaves irreversible physical traces?

This is not a rejection of classical SETI.

It is an expansion of the time dimension of the search.

Testable implications

For this reflection to matter, it must imply observable consequences.

If temporal robustness, filtering limits, and time-integration are central, then:

Long-duration observations and archival stacking

should outperform short snapshot searches.
Extremely faint, noise-like but persistent signals

may be more realistic than strong transient transmissions.
Signal-processing assumptions and filtering strategies

could unintentionally hide long-timescale technosignatures.
Technological artifacts and long-lived structures

may statistically dominate over active communication.
Time coverage

could be more important than frequency coverage.

These are empirical directions, not philosophical ones.

Which means this developer-born intuition—however naive—

is at least falsifiable.

Why this thought might emerge from software engineering

Experts already explore:

technosignatures
Dyson-like structures
atmospheric disequilibria
long-baseline surveys

So this perspective is not entirely new.

But software engineering enforces one deep habit:

Design for failure.

Design for delay.

Design for time.

And be careful what you filter out.

Looking at SETI through that lens naturally highlights

a dimension that might otherwise feel secondary:

temporal persistence hidden inside noise.

Maybe the universe is asynchronous

If civilizations rarely overlap in time,

then cosmic silence might not mean:

life is rare
intelligence is rare
technology is rare

It might simply mean:

Synchronization is rare.

Persistence is subtle.

And detection requires patience.

In asynchronous systems,

only long-lived state is eventually discovered.

A final reflection from a developer

Again, I’m not a specialist.

This could all be misguided.

But the intuition keeps returning:

The most visible signs of intelligence in the universe

may not be the fastest or loudest signals,

but the ones that are faint, stable, asynchronous—

and impossible to erase over time.

If SETI has mostly been listening for clear voices,

the real discovery might instead be

a whisper hidden inside noise,

revealed only by time.

And if that’s true,

then the most important search parameter

is not frequency,

not bandwidth,

not modulation—

but time.