An Extraterrestrial Search

How to Find Aliens

Physicists at the University of California, Santa Barbara are taking a unique approach to the search for extraterrestrial life . Instead of searching the cosmos for radio signals , they’re hunting for brilliant light beams to locate intelligent beings in the Andromeda Galaxy.It’s inspired by UC Santa Barbara physicist Phil Lubin’s previous suggestion that we could propel tiny spacecraft to nearby stars at about 20 percent the speed of light with lasers. If we could do it, so might alien civilizations, the thinking goes. So Lubin, alongside fellow physicists, plans search for high-powered lasers in the sky coming from hypothetical intelligent extraterrestrial life.To find these laser beacons, the UC Santa Barbara team plans to use “only a 0.8 meter telescope, a standard photometric system, and an image processing pipeline,” according to their paper , to survey and photograph the Andromeda Galaxy, also known as Messier 31, or M31. They’re going to compare new observations with old images of the galaxy, looking for a “new star,” that might actually be an artificial light from another galaxy. If researchers locate any bright spots that they haven’t seen before, they will investigate further to see if it could be coming from extraterrestrials.This method and process are automated, and so, as long as there is funding, interest, and support for such a search, the “Trillion Planet Survey” will continue.