High-Intensity Beams, Not Whispers: Study Suggests Aliens Would Send Strong Signals
Authored by Rupendra Brahambhatt via Interesting Engineering, For more than half a century, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence has been built on the assumption that if aliens exist and try to communicate, their signals will be faint, scattered, and easy to miss. An alien doll.James Bat Barrera/Pexels So astronomers have spent decades scanning narrow slices of the radio spectrum, hoping to catch a weak signal buried in cosmic noise. However, a new study suggests something totally different-if an advanced civilization actually wanted to be noticed, it would not broadcast weak, unfocused emissions. It would do the opposite – concentrate its power into tightly aimed, high-intensity beams directed at specific targets. “Our principal assumption is that a purposely communicative technological civilization will do its technological best to establish communication with other extraterrestrial technological intelligences (ETIs),” Benjamin Zuckerman, study author and an astrophysicist from the University of California, Los Angeles, said. If this idea is even roughly right, then the silence in our data is not just a lack of evidence. It actually limits how many nearby civilizations …
