Decades of tireless searching for radio transmissions from space, with the intention of discovering civilizations of intelligent beings, have for now ended in nothing. Now, an optical telescope has also been mobilized to search for extraterrestrial life. Will an extraterrestrial civilization be discovered through the light of the laser?
By: Yoram Ored, Galileo
Decades of tireless searching for radio transmissions from space, with the intention of discovering civilizations of intelligent beings, have for now ended in nothing. During these years the radio telescopes became more sophisticated, larger and equipped with better detectors and faster and faster computers to process the data received. And yet... nothing.
Do, after all, such civilizations do not exist at all, or are we looking in the wrong direction? Recently, a new telescope was inaugurated at the Oak Ridge Observatory, in Harvard, Mississippi, in the United States (Oak Ridge Observatory), to search for those coveted civilizations; But this time it is not a radio telescope, but an optical telescope. This telescope will search for laser signals from deep space, which will hopefully reveal to us the reality of distant civilizations in space. The telescope is 1.8 meters in diameter and is funded through the Pasadena Private Planetary Society.
Why search with an optical telescope?
Although light transmissions do not travel as great distances as radio transmissions (due to absorption of light in the interstellar dust), the amount of information they are able to transmit is much greater, due to their high frequency. Therefore, it is possible that this is the method of transmission that will be preferred by civilizations interested in transmitting transmissions to outer space.
A few attempts to locate transmissions from such civilizations using an optical telescope have been made, admittedly, in the past, but none of those attempts have been as comprehensive as this one. The telescope was built with $350,000 in funding, and will be capable of processing 3.5 terabytes of information in one second. In the future, another identical optical telescope will be built, which will operate alongside this telescope, in order to independently test laser transmissions suspected of belonging to an extraterrestrial civilization.
Will the hope of finding extraterrestrial civilizations really come true through the light, the laser light, which will inform us that after all we are not alone in the universe?
