Are we looking for aliens in all the wrong ways?
SETI is searching for the same signals humans were producing in the 1960s. Why wouldn’t aliens do better?
“I know perfectly well that at this moment the whole universe is listening to us, and that every word we say echoes to the remotest star.” -Jean Giraudoux
A little over 80 years ago, humanity first began broadcasting radio and television signals with enough power that they should leave Earth’s atmosphere and progress deep into interstellar space. If someone living in a distant star system were keeping a vigilant eye out for these signals, they would not only be able to pick them up, but immediately identify them as created by an intelligent species. In 1960, Frank Drake first proposed searching for such signals from other star systems by using large radio dishes, giving rise to SETI: the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Yet over the past half-century, we’ve developed far more efficient ways to communicate across the globe than with broadcast radio and TV signals. Does searching for aliens in the electromagnetic spectrum even make sense anymore?
This question, of course, is extraordinarily speculative, but gives us a chance to look at our own technological progress, and to consider how that might play out elsewhere in the…
