Optical SETI

[ChrisIB]

Do aliens exist? Human technology may prevent us from finding out

When it comes to hearing aliens, we may be victims of our assumptions about how they would talk to us. We tend to think of radio as the best means of communications because it was the first such technology that humans invented, says Wright. But with our most powerful technology, she says, we could theoretically pack all the internet’s contents into a message sent tens of thousands of light-years away through a laser beam—which means another civilization could do the same

And so Wright and others are developing a new field of astronomy. It’s called optical SETI, and its instruments are focused on a different band of the light spectrum than radio astronomy, looking instead at the same waves our eyes take in, along with infrared frequencies, which are just a smidge longer. It’s also a technology we suspect aliens might use because humans have found it so powerful.

Wright is leading an optical SETI project to build a pair of observatories, faceted like giant soccer balls, in California. She hopes to turn prototypes on this year and to be watching the entire sky within six years. They will look for bright bursts of light, as if searching for a superpowered camera flash from an alien photographer.

 

[nivek]

Interesting idea, but would this be about equivalent to search for someone lighting a cigarette in a busy and lit up city from orbit?...

 

[ChrisIB]

Several scenarios where it is thought viable. If two planets use it to communicate and they happen to be in the same plane as us, we would get periodic signals. Also leakage from a beamed power infrastructure.
Apparently a pulsed nanosecond laser source can be thousands of times brighter than a sun

 

[nivek]

Several scenarios where it is thought viable. If two planets use it to communicate and they happen to be in the same plane as us, we would get periodic signals. Also leakage from a beamed power infrastructure.
Apparently a pulsed nanosecond laser source can be thousands of times brighter than a sun

It's a bit of a reach honestly, not sure if it's worth the time and money for such remote possibilities...Space is too vast to narrow possible indications of intelligent life this way...