It Might Be Easy To Find Aliens - We’ve Just Been Searching Wrong, Scientist Says

For decades, we have been listening to the skies using radio telescopes - hoping to catch the faint chatter of alien signals.

But there could be an easier way, a NASA scientist has suggested.

Instead of listening for radio signals, we should look for the telltale ‘flashes’ of civilisations using ‘directed energy’ - a pioneering technology championed by Stephen Hawking for a project to send a spacecraft to Alpha Centauri in 20 years.

Backed by Russian Internet billionaire Yuri Milner and Mark Zuckerberg, the microscopic spacecraft would travel at a fifth of the speed of light.

The nanocraft, powered by a sail pushed by a light beam, could potentially travel the distance over 1,000 times faster and make the journey in 20 years.

Philip Lubin of NASA believes that ‘flashes’ using such a system - or beacons deliberately set up using directed energy - could offer a way to find aliens.

In a new paper, Lubin writes, ‘‘There are a number of reasons a civilisation would use directed energy systems of the type discussed here.

‘If other civilisations have an environment like we do they might use DE system for applications such as propulsion or scanning systems to survey their local environment, power beaming across large distances among many others.

‘Surveys that are sensitive to these ‘utilitarian’ applications are a natural by-product of the ‘spill over’ of these issues, through a systematic beacon would be much easier to detect.’