SETI@Home: Revised scale of significance of ET detection published.

A group of SETI astronomers led by Duncan Forgan, and including myself and BSRC director Andrew Siemion, has published a revised version of the Rio Scale. The Rio Scale is designed to predict the public impact a signal would have, like the Richter scale does for earthquakes. The prior version of the Rio scale, in addition to being rarely used, tended to overestimate the impact of low quality or low significance reports of detection.

Now all we have to do is convince other SETI astronomers and the press to use it.

There is a related article at GeekWire.

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