Keji Scoring Protocol
Motivated by decades of disappointing discoveries of primitive alien life, a team of scientists funded by the Zhongguo-Cruz Corporate Empire Alliance develop a scale for evaluating the expected level of technology on a distant planet based on the information content in the patterns of its electromagnetic signals. The somewhat inexplicable marketing decision to label it the Keji Scoring Protocol garnered mockery and indignation in the mediasphere. Nonetheless, the promise of new discovery lead to its immediate adoption by Project Expedition, as a means to direct exploration toward planets identified as candidates for having organic life that also showed signs of advanced technology.