Astrobiology has long sought signs of extraterrestrial life through biosignatures and technosignatures. But a grey area exists between these categories: signs of intelligence that are neither purely biological nor highly technological. A new field called noosemiotics proposes considering noosignatures, imprints of mind on matter, as potential evidence of alien civilizations. A surprising example of a noosignature is bread.
Bread as a noosignature: intelligence that evolves
Julia DeMarines, an American astrobiologist, applied Assembly Theory to quantify the complexity of objects like bread. According to DeMarines, bread does not spontaneously form from a molecular cloud; it requires technology, history, and intelligence. The Assembly Index, measuring the number of steps to produce something, applied to bread reveals increasing complexity over time, from early wild-grain loaves to industrial white bread. This makes it an ideal noosignature, similar to stone tools or writing.
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From theory to detectability: what signs can we observe?
The main challenge is detecting noosignatures remotely. DeMarines suggests that some human activities, such as agriculture, may have altered Earth's nitrogen cycle thousands of years ago. This atmospheric imbalance could be visible to alien observers long before our radio transmissions. If detectable noosignatures exist, Earth might have shown signs of non-technological intelligence for millennia. Similarly, human innovations like the battery upgrade in the Galaxy S27 Ultra represent ongoing technological imprints, but bread transcends that by embodying cultural evolution.
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For further reading, see the original article on Space.com or the Wikipedia entry on noosphere.
Moreover, the concept of non-technological intelligence is fascinating: creatures like dolphins, while intelligent, may never develop technology due to their anatomy. Yet they might leave noosignatures in other ways. The search for noosignatures could reveal that the universe is more full of life than we imagine.
