The study has produced the most consistently negative results in the history of science. For over 60 years, researchers have been trying to find even one piece of convincing evidence to support the idea that humans share the universe with other intelligent life. Despite decades of effort, they have been unable to achieve any kind of contact.
But researchers believe we may be entering a new era in the search for extraterrestrial civilizations. Scientists from Breakthrough Listen, the world’s largest scientific research program dedicated to finding extraterrestrial civilizations, say a series of technological developments are poised to revolutionize the search for intelligent life in the universe.
These innovations will be outlined at the group’s annual conference, held in Oxford this week for the first time in the UK, and expected to be attended by hundreds of scientists, from astronomers to zoologists.
Steve Croft, project scientist and astronomer at Breakthrough Listen, said: “Amazing technologies are being developed, including the construction of huge new telescopes in Chile, Africa and Australia, and the development of AI that will change the way we search for extraterrestrial civilisations.”
Among these new devices are: Square Kilometer Arraywith hundreds of radio telescopes currently under construction in South Africa and Australia; Vera Rubin Observatory Two satellites under construction in Chile. The former will be the world’s most powerful radio astronomy facility, while the latter will be the world’s largest camera, capable of capturing images of the entire sky in visible light every three to four nights, and are expected to help discover millions of new galaxies and stars.
Both facilities are scheduled to begin observing in the next few years, and both will contribute data to Breakthrough Listen, which will use AI to analyze these vast streams of information and find subtle patterns that could be evidence of intelligent life, further powering the search for extraterrestrial civilizations, Croft added.
“Until now, we’ve only been able to look for signals that aliens have deliberately sent out to announce their presence. The new technology is so sensitive that, for the first time, we can detect unintentional, unintended transmissions, allowing us to spot things like alien airport radars or powerful TV transmitters.”
Professor Adam Frank, an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester in New York, supports the importance of being able to detect civilizations through traces of their everyday activities: “By looking for the traces of the everyday activities of alien societies – their technosignatures – we are building an entirely new toolkit for finding intelligent, civilized life,” he writes in a new book. Alien Little Book.
All sorts of technological signatures, from artificial lighting to air pollution, have been suggested as indicators of the presence of alien civilizations, and some scientists have suggested that we could detect their presence through solar panels built by alien civilizations, which absorb visible light but strongly reflect ultraviolet and infrared light, making them detectable with powerful telescopes.
But this could only be discovered if vast areas of the planet’s surface were covered in solar power plants, and hundreds of hours of observation time were devoted to such searches, says astrobiologist Lewis Dartnell. write In the latest BBC night sky magazine.
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But other alien efforts to capture solar radiation could be even more elaborate and conspicuous. American physicist Freeman Dyson once proposed that some civilizations might be advanced enough to build arrays of giant solar panels around their home planets. These giant orbital structures (called Dyson spheres) would be detectable from Earth, and several candidates have been proposed, including: Boyajian’s StarThis star in the constellation Cygnus emits sporadic and unpredictable light, and some have suggested that a Dyson sphere may be the cause, but recent observations have ruled that out.
The search for alien civilizations is the basis of many epic science fiction stories. E.T. To contact, arrival and District 9But extraterrestrial life remains the stuff of fiction, even though astronomer Frank Drake began to seriously search for possible signals from the stars Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridanus using a 26-meter radio telescope in 1960. Nothing was detected, and this continues to be the case despite vast improvements in the power and precision of modern telescopes.
It remains to be seen whether this streak of negative results will continue. Croft is optimistic that we will make contact soon: “We know that the conditions for life are everywhere, and the ingredients for life are everywhere.
“I think it would be very strange if we were the only habitable planet in the galaxy or the universe, but it’s possible.”
