According to our current classification of Alien Civilizations, there are two kinds of aliens that we could discover within the next century: 1st one is Primitive, the microbial life forms within the boundaries of our own solar system and the second one is the intelligent one, advanced alien race that could completely modify our entire way of life. NASA and other space agencies around the world are making remarkable steps toward exposing the first one - life within our own solar system. But until now, the predictions of discovering intelligent ET have been way too low.
Two astrophysicists have lately presented a radical new method in the search for intelligent alien life, and according to them it could help us spot signals from a progressive alien race, if any exist in less than the next 70 years. They suggest that instead of looking at how we humans might find extraterrestrials, the astronomers should study how extraterrestrials might find us. It’s promising that aliens might, by now, know Earth exists, holds life, and they’re trying to contact us right now. Now comes the big question, how would they try to find us?
Undoubtedly, it’s impossible to know what possible alien researchers are thinking, but when it comes to the hunt for distant planets, the possibilities are very much limited by the geometry of space. For that reason, it’s not absurd to visualize that aliens might find Earth using the same methods that modern astronomers use here on Planet Earth.
Now with that in mind, astrophysicist René Heller and RalphPudritz from Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research mapped out a thin band in the night sky of the most likeable regions we could find signals from intelligent aliens.
Current method that astronomers use to look for exoplanets is to measure the brightness of distant stars. Exoplanets way too small and dim, but they make themselves detectable passing in front of a star. This is known as the Transit technique. Although this is an effective planet-hunting method at the moment, it can only spot a planet given that the parent star and exoplanets are along Earth’s line of sight.
Consequently, whereas there may be several thousands of exoplanets out there in the cosmos, we may never detect or study many of them. And even though that’s somewhat discouraging, Heller and Pudritz comprehended that this similar limitation applies to any extraterrestrials out there who could be using the similar method.
Now going from that notion, they inverted the scenario that we use to search for aliens and as an alternative, plotted where in the sky aliens could observe Earth passing right in front of our Sun.
So it turns out that it’s a fairly small area called “Earth’s Transit Zone”, nearly two thousandths the size of the whole sky. This narrows down the search quite a bit, but Heller and Pudrtiz went beyond this.
They observed all of the stars inside that area similar to our Parent star since some consider the greatest chances for the evolution of intelligent life is near to the Sun-like stars. They discovered 82 stars, which now serves as a useful list for SETI initiatives.
Heller said in a press release “The key point of this strategy is that it confines the search area to a very small part of the sky. As a consequence, it might take us less than a human life span [about 70 years] to find out whether or not there are extraterrestrial astronomers who have found the Earth.”
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