The Sunday Read: ‘The Search for Intelligent Life Is About to Get a Lot More Interesting’

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The New York Times

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🗓️ 9 October 2022

⏱️ 42 minutes

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Summary

The search for intelligence beyond Earth has long entranced humans. According to Jon Gertner, a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, this search has been defined “by an assumption that extraterrestrials would have developed radio technologies akin to what humans have created.” However, Mr. Gertner writes, “rather than looking for direct calls to Earth, telescopes now sweep the sky, searching billions of frequencies simultaneously, for electronic signals whose origins can’t be explained by celestial phenomena.” What scientists are most excited about is the prospect of other planets’ civilizations being able to create the same “telltale chemical and electromagnetic signs,” or, as they are now called, “technosignatures.”

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0:00.0	When the images from the James Webb Telescope were revealed, my reaction was just slack
0:10.9	jawed wonder.
0:12.9	It's this Christmas of stars.
0:17.7	We see these brilliant points of light and pinwheels of distant galaxies and stellar
0:23.5	nurseries. These locations were clouds of collapsing gas and dust give birth to stars.
0:31.5	Seeing the images is like seeing a painting in your mind that suddenly doesn't look fuzzy
0:36.4	anymore. Like so many pictures of stars we've seen in the past.
0:43.7	So do you remember those beautiful vertical streaks of gas? They were in that first set of
0:48.8	images. They look like mountains, big, Auburn and gold. NASA called them cosmic cliffs.
0:57.1	They were said to be four light years high. I did some quick math and that works out
1:02.6	to about 24 trillion miles. And that made me think, well, we can look at these images
1:10.7	aesthetically with wonder, but we could also look at them with total confusion. What do
1:16.1	we make of that scale? What do we make of our lives in our place in this universe?
1:22.2	My name is John Gertner and I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times magazine. We've
1:27.0	been looking for signs of life in the universe for at least a half a century. And for many
1:32.0	years, that search is focused on using radio astronomy. We tried pulling signals out of
1:38.5	the sky that would hint at somebody out there who's trying to communicate with us. We've
1:44.3	never found anything. But over the last couple of decades, there's been a kind of two-part
1:50.8	revolution in astronomy. We've discovered all these exoplanets. These are planets orbiting
1:57.2	around distant stars. And by now, NASA has discovered more than 5,000 of them. Each
2:03.2	one is a place to look for life. We also now have this new arsenal of tools like the
2:09.1	web telescope, which can look at atmospheres around these exoplanets. So I wrote about this
	...

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