A New Way to Search for Alien Civilizations

Are we searching for extraterrestrial intelligence the wrong way?

For decades, SETI researchers have focused on finding narrowband radio signals that might stand out from the natural universe. But what if an advanced civilization that wanted to communicate chose a very different strategy?

Join host Dr. Lauren Sgro and UCLA astronomer Dr. Ben Zuckerman as they discuss his new paper, Broadband Searches for Extraterrestrial Technological Intelligence: A New Strategy to Find Nearby Alien Civilizations. The research proposes a new approach to SETI that focuses on broadband signals and existing astronomical surveys, potentially changing how we search for evidence of technological civilizations beyond Earth.

Could signs of extraterrestrial technology already be hidden in data we've collected for entirely different purposes? What can current observations tell us about the likelihood of nearby communicative civilizations? And what does the cosmos's apparent silence really mean?

Paper: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ae4c38