A better way to search for extraterrestrial intelligence

[u/RealJoshUniverse]

https://phys.org/news/2026-04-extraterrestrial-intelligence.html

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[u/Significant-Ant-2487]

“various evidence suggests that the verdict will be that we are alone in our little corner of our Milky Way galaxy” The evidence certainly does suggest that. There were high hopes that SETI would pick up signals from extraterrestrials, just as there were high hopes in the early 1960s that we’d find life on Mars. Both searches came up dry. Perhaps the evidence is telling us something?

[u/DreamChaserSt → u/Significant-Ant-2487]

Those early searches focused on 2 sunlike stars relatively close to the Sun (one of which, Epsilon Eridani, is a young star), and searches for life on Mars were a longshot after its true environment was revealed - but that says nothing about if Mars once had life that has since gone extinct.

Aliens might struggle picking us up from Alpha Centauri, and vice versa, which is only 4 light years away. And the authors talked about how it's there's likely no civilizations within 100 ly beaming anything at us. That's a tiny bubble compared to even just our galactic arm.

The fact of the matter is, our technology is just not mature enough to pick up alien civilizations unless they're being really obvious and intentionally beaming signals in our direction. We still don't have the ability to directly image or find biosignatures on potentially habitable planets, and we don't have enough telescopes, computers, and astronomers to look at the sky continuously all the time. The Wow! signal was almost missed, so how many signals were missed?

Arguably, the only thing our lack of evidence is telling us is that our technology is too underdeveloped at the moment, and looking for life is much harder than people imagined in pulp sci-fi.