Hunt for Intelligent Aliens Focuses on Faint Laser Flashes

SPACE.com ^ | August 20, 2013 03:50pm ET | Charles Q. Choi,

[BenLurkin]

When it comes to detecting laser pulses aliens might shoot at Earth to attract our attention, scientists now find they can detect signals as faint as a single photon of light every few tiny fractions of a second.

Astronomers have gazed at the skies for decades searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. Lasers can in principle help transmit messages over extraordinary distances, but while scientists have monitored a large number of stars looking for alien laser signals — for instance, facilities at Harvard and Princeton scanned more than 10,000 sun-like stars for several years — no evidence for any have been found yet.

Prior attempts to look for extraterrestrial laser signals concentrated on isolated bursts of light, ones so extraordinarily intense they are likely artificial. In contrast, laser scientist Walter Leeb at the Vienna University of Technology in Austria and his colleagues are focusing on repetitive, faint laser signals received over a sufficiently long amount of time

[Ann Archy]

I just want to find some Intelligent people in our Government!! That would be SO ALIEN to me!!!

[TigersEye]

If they are intelligent they wouldn’t try to get our attention.

[SkyDancer]

What was the laser beam spread from Earth to the moon? Something like a quarter mile? At a quarter mile at 250k miles how wide would the beam be from millions of light years away?

[fso301]

Sounds like an improbable search for an optical needle in a cosmic haystack. As always, the overriding assumption being that lifeforms on other planets are more advanced than our own.

[HarleyLady27]

Don't go looking on the House floor today, they have not one brain cell between the lot of them...

Absolutely no life form or intelligent there...

[SAJ]

Any plans to search for intelligent life in D.C. announced?

[wally_bert]

We’re looking for lesser aliens since higher ones would use phasers, disruptors,PPGs and the like.

[tbw2]

Satellite uplink equivalents and radar are worth more.
What an Alien SETI Program Would Learn from Earth’s Signals
hubpages.com/technology/What-an-Alien-SETI-Program-Would-Learn-from-Earths-Signals

[rjsimmon]

What was the laser beam spread from Earth to the moon? Something like a quarter mile?

A bit more than that. 6.5 km or 4 miles.

[VanDeKoik]

Not to mention that they would have know about Earth, and know there was life on it, and aim their laser just at the right point in anticipation that our planet would be at this place at this time to receive it.

[SkyDancer]

If the light is millions of light years away then how did they know where Earth would be in the future and secondly are they still alive?

[Brookhaven]

The search for space aliens is the atheist version of the search for God.

[mikeus_maximus]

What if, an infinite, all-knowing and all-powerful Being, spoke the universe into existence with the power of His voice, and placed the only living physical beings on only one insignificant speck of a planet perfectly balanced near an unremarkable star among millions in a small, unexceptional galaxy among countless others?

Imagine the cosmic implications of just how unimportant and worthless those few, frail, impotent little beings are.

And what if, that Creator had made His universe subject to a natural moral law that stems from His basic character, then gave those pitiful little beings existing on that insignificant speck the choice whether or not to accept Him and follow that moral law, while warning them that failure to do so would cause their eternal death? And what if, He loved them so much that he couldn’t bear to see that happen to those who loved Him, and since He couldn’t change His basic moral character, he instead humbled Himself and suffered a penalty of physical death in their place to satisfy His moral law?

Imagine the eternal implications of just how important those few, frail, little children must be to their Creator!

I have no problem accepting that we on Earth are alone in the universe. Because we’re really not.

Follow the evidence.

[BenLurkin]

I agree.

The Democrat Party is turning our government into a Thugocracy.

Live on television.

[fella]

the overriding assumption is more grant money.

[lurk]

Who is paying for this snipe hunt? Taxpayers?

[SunkenCiv]

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[Uncle Miltie]

Juan Valdez has a laser pointer?

[afsnco]

Amen.