Incredible Technology: How to Search for Advanced Alien Civilizations.
Look at a picture of the Earth at night, and the world appears to be, quite literally, glowing. Now, scientists are starting to look for signs of advanced alien civilizations by the glow given off by technology used to harvest the energy from a star or even an entire galaxy.
Theoretical physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson first proposed the idea that advanced alien civilizations might develop technology to encircle a star and harvest most of its power, a structure now known as a Dyson sphere. If these objects do exist, astronomers might be able to detect the waste heat they produce using telescopes that peer into space using infrared light.
"The main point," Dyson told LiveScience, "is looking for aliens who don't want to communicate. My question was, 'How do you look for silent aliens?' They have to radiate away their waste heat. The only way to do that is to radiate lots of infrared radiation." [13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Aliens]
Now, astronomers at Pennsylvania State University are starting to narrow the search for Dyson spheres. But the search has only just begun, and may take hundreds of years, Dyson said. Finding Dyson spheres isn't inevitable, but "it's certainly possible," he said.
Great balls of fire
Much of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) effort has focused on listening for radio signals sent by an intelligent civilization, as depicted in the movie "Contact." But this approach assumes the aliens want to communicate with humans. Dyson spheres get around this problem, because even a civilization that wasn't actively trying to communicate with others would give off waste heat.
http://news.yahoo.com/incredible-technology-search-advanced-alien-civilizations-111620183.html
Sounds like a few scientists finally decided to hypothesize what all those flying craft are dancing around our Sun.
Infra-red, fine, but if their planet has a slightly higher albedo then we still would not see it.
Dyson spheres? Interesting concept, i know only of the Dyson vacuum cleaner that strangely enough, is vortex tech copied from Schauberger, LOL
Forget radio signals, look for small changes in the gravitational constant, and look for 'cosmic ray' activity.
We re now able to both generate & recieve gravito-metric waves, which of course are faster than light. Star Trek for real ;)
There are supposed to be 5 stages of civilisation.
Stage 0 are planet-bound hunter-gatherer humanoids like ourselves :D
Stage 1 are interplanetary, just getting into nanotech etc.
Stage 2 are interstellar, they are alo helped by higher civilisations.
Stage 3 are intergalactic, are very ancient, and are almost ready to leave their physical selves behind, they are super intelligent, benign.
Stage 4 are ethereal creatures, they have evolved to the point of not requiring bodies, they are pure energy organised as thought....
we are about to become a stage 1 race, but if we take all our emotional, political & religious baggage with us, we will probably dissappear.....
if we recognise that there are other races out there, freindly or not, that are 10,000 years ahead of us, and in the case of stage 4, millions of years, then these are indeed, baby steps ::)
Coherent light may be a good indicator, but there are plenty of quasars etc that also give misleading signals.
Sorry for rambling, forgive an old man's foibles ::)