Left: a five-dish radio array sweeps the sky the way real SETI programs do, listening for an artificial signal among natural noise. Right: whichever body you select — Mars, the icy moons Europa & Enceladus, Titan, or a generic exoplanet — grows an atmosphere shell whose glow represents how strong its biosignature case is once spectroscopy is switched on. Almost every "candidate" the array flags gets ruled out as noise moments later — exactly SETI's real track record after more than 60 years of listening.
Biosignature confidence = TargetBase × (0.5 + 0.5 × intensity/100) × (spectroscopy on ? 1 : 0.15)
TargetBase: Mars = 30 Europa/Enceladus = 55 Titan = 35 Exoplanet = 65
Signals scanned += rate × dt (only while SETI is on)
Candidate flagged: small random chance per scan tick, scaled by intensity — almost always ruled out as noise within a few seconds.
- Mars — past water, organic compounds and a plausible microbial past, but no confirmed biology; Perseverance is caching samples for a future Sample Return mission.
- Europa & Enceladus — subsurface oceans under ice, with Enceladus venting them into space through geysers; the highest baseline confidence here, still unconfirmed pending Europa Clipper.
- Titan — lakes of liquid methane instead of water and rich organic chemistry; life here, if it exists, would run on different chemistry entirely — Dragonfly launches to find out.
- Exoplanet — atmospheric spectroscopy (James Webb and successors) hunts for O₂, CH₄ and O₃ together, since any one gas alone can form abiotically.
- Fermi paradox — if life and intelligence are common, why the silence? Distance, timing mismatches across cosmic history, and the possibility that technological civilizations self-destruct are the leading explanations — this sim's empty signal log is the paradox in miniature.