User:Wer900/Rio Scale

The Rio Scale is a scale devised by Iván Almár of the Konkoly Observatory and Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute in order to gauge the cultural impact of extraterrestrial contact. The scale considers various factors, including whether extraterrestrial contact takes place in the form of a message with information, a deliberate beacon, or merely by radiation leakage, what distance from Earth the message originates from, what the probability of a false detection is, whether the discovery was made in newly-collected or archival data, and whether or not dedicated SETI efforts had detected extraterrestrial life. Based on these factors, a Rio Scale index from one to ten is generated, with higher numbers indicating more profound results for humanity.

In 2011, the Rio Scale was updated to include a rating for extraterrestrial artifacts. Almár, the creator of the original Rio Scale as well as its revision, also suggested that the definition of "artifact" should for the purposes of the Rio Scale also be used to denote technosignatures&mdash;any evidence other than physical artifacts, electromagnetic waves, or radiation leakage for the existence of an extraterrestrial civilization.

The Rio Scale equation
As seen at the left, the Rio Scale contains numerous parameters measuring to what extent humanity would be affected by extraterrestrial contact. The term Q in the Rio Scale equation can be calculated simply by adding the values of all of the contact parameters (excluding reliability) together, yielding a maximum value of fifteen and a minimum of three. Q is then multiplied by the reliability factor δ, which ranges from four-sixths to zero, to obtain a Rio Scale index IRS between zero and ten. A value of ten indicates that the event has powerful and extraordinary significance, while a value of one indicates very minor significance and a value of zero indicates no significance at all.