I, for one, am always open to new methodsof communication and laser lights seemed to be one of the best and easiest methods we could use.. The light travels fast, can be seen from almost all directions and will keep travelling so that our position can be pinpointed..
But are we ready for the results? Can we really say we’d be happy to receive a contact? Would we really tell the world that we had found something of this nature being pointed at us? If history is anything to by, then we might have a hard time getting to that..
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. [13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Aliens]
“We assumed that aliens would use the simplest possible way of attracting our attention, one already implemented in seafaring since ancient times using lighthouses — that is, periodic light pulses,” Leeb said.
Hunt for Intelligent Aliens Focuses on Faint Laser Flashes
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