Listening to the stars
One of the most exciting searches to date is Breakthrough Listen, the largest scientific research program dedicated to looking for evidence of intelligent life beyond Earth.
This is one of many projects funded by U.S.-based Israeli entrepreneurs Julia and Yuri Milner, with some serious dollars attached. Over a 10-year period a total amount of $100 million will be invested in this effort, and they have a mighty big task at hand.
Breakthrough Listen is currently targeting the closest one million stars in the hope of identifying any unnatural, alien-made radio signals. Using telescopes around the globe, from the 210-foot (64 meter) Murriyang Dish (Parkes) here in Australia, to the 64-antenna MeerKAT array in South Africa, the search is one of epic proportions. But it isn’t the only one.
Hiding away in the Cascade Mountains north of San Francisco sits the Allen Telescope Array, the first radio telescope built from the ground up specifically for SETI use.
This unique facility is another exciting project, able to search for signals every day of the year. This project is currently upgrading the hardware and software on the original dish, including the ability to target several stars at once. This is a part of the non-profit research organization, the SETI Institute.
Space lasers!
The SETI Institute is also looking for signals that would be best explained as “space lasers”.
Some astronomers hypothesise that intelligent beings might use massive lasers to communicate or even to propel spacecraft. This is because even here on Earth we’re investigating laser communication and laser-propelled light sails.
To search for these mysterious flashes in the night sky, we need speciality instruments in locations around the globe, which are currently being developed and deployed. This is a research area I’m excited to watch progress and eagerly await results.
As of writing this article, sadly no alien laser signals have been found yet.
Out there, somewhere
It’s always interesting to ponder who or what might be living out in the universe, but there is one problem we must overcome to meet or communicate with aliens. It’s the speed of light.
Everything we rely on to communicate via space requires light, and it can only travel so fast. This is where my optimism for finding intelligent life begins to fade. The universe is big — really big.
To put it in perspective, humans started using radio waves to communicate across large distances in 1901. That first transatlantic signal has only travelled 122 light-years, reaching just 0.0000015 percent of the stars in our Milky Way.