The new goal of NASA to search for extraterrestrial civilizations: technology signs

NASA has resumed the search for extraterrestrial civilizations. The US Congress asked the agency to re-launch this project in 2018. His first step towards achieving this goal was the NASA Technosignatures Workshop working conference, which took place last September.

If you have never looked at the starry sky in thinking about whether there are other civilizations besides ours, it will be difficult for you to understand such a train of thought. One of the most ancient and constant desires of a person is to find out if we are alone. And although the probability of success seems small, it is impossible to resist this aspiration. And in their new attempt at NASA they decided to use techno-signs [technosignatures].
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What are techno-signs?

Technological features are just signs of technology. This is the result of the use of technology by the inhabitants of the planet. The most obvious example is radio waves, but some search experts reject their use, since the Universe is filled with radio waves emitted from natural sources.

The first project to search for extraterrestrial civilizations was SETI . But this, in fact, was a search for radio signals, specifically sent by another civilization in our direction. The scope of the new search will be different. Technological features are not specially sent signals providing evidence of the presence of a technologically advanced civilization.

Technological features include laser beams, signs of the presence of megastructures such as the Dyson sphere, or, unfortunately, a polluted atmosphere. The conference also discussed the possibility of finding megacities on other planets on the heat they emit, and on the detection of artificial satellites of the planets. But in each of the cases, techno-signs will not be obvious to us. We will need some advanced observation techniques to determine if the signs we have discovered are technological.

For this conference was collected. The speakers described the current detection capabilities of techno-signs, the most promising ways of development in this area and what measures can advance science towards this goal. The main objective of the conference is to understand how NASA can organize support for this area, forming partnerships with private companies and charitable organizations.

An example of partnership in this area already exists. The SETI project was owned by NASA until 1993, and then Congress decided to end its support. Since then, it has been funded by other organizations and wealthy people, such as Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft.

But now NASA is back in the game, and is taking the first step to update the projects for the discovery of other civilizations. This step follows some of the most important discoveries made in the past few years. For a long time, we did not know whether other stars have planets, or whether our solar system is unique. But Kepler’s mission has changed that. She has already discovered more than 2,600 exoplanets. At the same time, Kepler studied a very small part of the sky.


Exoplanet candidates for June 2017. Will any of these planets have any techno-signs?

With such data, it makes no sense to worry that exoplanets will be too small in our galaxy and in the universe. In the congress, apparently, they understood this, and decided to instruct NASA to search for signs of civilizations on some of the recently discovered exoplanets.

Telescopes currently under construction and being projected will allow us to obtain images of exoplanets, study their atmospheres and potentially detect hot spots on their surface. We may even be able to use the transit method to detect artificial satellites on these planets. No one knows what we will be able to find, and it is hard to resist the joyful excitement.

There is still much to be done. Scientists will have to choose the best course of action. But when this event starts, it will have to be quite interesting.