Advanced alien civilizations could communicate via series of flashing lights, much like fireflies do, a new paper suggests. This could make finding extraterrestrial life much more difficult if we continue to rely on current observational techniques, researchers argue.
However, while this thought experiment raises interesting questions about alien intelligence, it provides no evidence that these signals actually exist.
So far, the quest to uncover alien intelligence has focused on finding evidence of distant human-like civilizations. For example, the Exploration of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute, the world’s leading organization dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial life, spends most of its time searching for radio signals from distant exoplanets and the heat emanating from technological megastructures such as the theoretical Dyson sphere.
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However, some scientists believe that these explorations have an “anthropocentric bias” (meaning that we are trying to understand non-human beings through an explicitly human lens) and do not take into account potential civilizations quite different from our own. Because of this bias, we may miss the promising signs in life.
In a new study uploaded to the preprint server arXiv on November 8, researchers have proposed a new way that alien civilizations could communicate by blinking at each other like fireflies. These flashing signals may be used for certain complex communications. But researchers argue that they are likely broadcast widely to other civilizations, like beacons with repeating lights. (This paper has not yet been peer-reviewed, but is currently being considered for publication in the journal PNAS.)
On Earth, fireflies communicate through a series of regularly repeated flashes caused by internal chemical reactions. These flashes are primarily used to find mates. However, although these signals are simple, they allow different firefly species to distinguish from each other.
Researchers claim similar blinking could be used by alien civilizations as a “we’re here” signal. And the space is rich with repeated bursts of light.
In a new paper, researchers analyzed flashes from more than 150 pulsars (fast-rotating, highly magnetized neutron stars that emit regular beams of electromagnetic radiation) as an indication of what these signals look like. Although they found no evidence of artificial signals, they noted some similarities between pulsar and firefly signals and proposed a method that could detect future firefly-like flashes from other natural objects like pulsars.
The research team argues that these signals may be more likely to have evolved in long-term alien civilizations that have advanced beyond the need for widespread use of radio waves. Similar advances are already occurring on Earth, where the use of communication satellites that transmit more specific and focused radio signals is making the Earth appear more “radio-quiet” from a distance, the researchers wrote.
And just because we don’t naturally think of communicating in this way doesn’t mean other civilizations don’t either, they added.
“Communication is a fundamental feature of life across lineages, manifesting itself in a great diversity of forms and strategies,” study co-author Estelle Janin, a doctoral candidate in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, recently told Universe Today. “If we want to expand our intuition and understanding of what alien communication looks like and what a theory of life should account for, it is essential to consider non-human communication.”
This is just one example of what non-human signals look like, and the researchers encourage others to think outside the anthropocentric box and come up with other ways non-human civilizations can communicate.
“Our study is a provocative thought experiment that aims to encourage SETI and animal communication research to engage more directly and draw on each other’s insights more systematically,” Janin said.
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