Looking for Solar Panels on Distant Planets
What are the aliens thinking? That’s always been a problem for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). Until recently, SETI’s focus has been on alien “beacons,” signals that somebody somewhere intentionally beamed into space. But this traditional method involves making informed guesses about what the aliens were thinking when they built their beacons, and those guesses may turn out to be laughably wrong.
There’s an entirely new way to do now, and understanding its promise begins with considering the properties of solar panels. Rather than just looking for beacons, researchers now want to also search for unintentional “technosignatures” from alien industrial civilizations. An example of an unintentional technosignature could be pollutants in a distant planet’s atmosphere, or the shadow of a large artificial structure orbiting a planet.
