While SETI researchers search for a new Wow! Signal thanks to the Breakthrough Listen cash infusion, they may want to search for something other than radio transmissions along the way. Like exhaust from microwaves used to propulse giant light sail-like spacecraft.

Two researchers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics proposed the new detection method in a paper draft published on Arxiv. James Guillochon and Abraham Loeb propose that a light sail-like craft—vehicles with a sail of conductive material that push them through space without rocket propellant—might get their thrust from microwave transmissions delivered from the ground of some alien planet. Those highly concentrated bursts of microwave would be easily detectable energy signatures from ground-based SETI instruments.

"Given its practical appeal for transit within our own solar system, it seems reasonable that intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy may employ similar technology to facilitate rapid transit between the habitable worlds within its host planetary system," Guillochon and Loeb write in the paper SETI via Leakage From Light Sails in Exoplanetary Systems.

Their model uses an Earth-Mars like system as a baseline. They propose leaked energy from the sides of the spacecraft could be spotted in transit to the spacecraft, with the point where it terminates indicating the presence of the light sail, which may appear as a series of short bursts. Those bursts would be detectable by Breakthrough Listen. They may also occur with some frequency. "As the infrastructure has a high capital cost but low operating expenses, it seems reasonable to expect that the apparatus would be in constant use by any civilization that has built it," Loeb and Guillochon write.

They further propose basing it off of Kepler data, utilizing planetary transit information to find worlds with similar separations and orbital resonances as Earth-Mars. Of course, this means that when we have more robust light sail technology that uses full-fledged energy beams, we might be detectable as well. And that could turn Bill Nye from heroic science educator who promoted light sails because they're awesome to the man responsible for our subjugation and destruction at the hands of an alien race.

Hopefully not.

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