Universe Today
Define the current state of the technosignature field. What experiments have occurred? What is the state-of-the-art for technosignature detection? What limits do we currently have on technosignatures?
Understand the advances coming near-term in the technosignature field. What assets are in place that can be applied to the search for technosignatures? What planned and funded projects will advance the state-of-the-art in future years, and what is the nature of that advancement?
Understand the future potential of the technosignature field. What new surveys, new instruments, technology development, new data-mining algorithms, new theory and modeling, etc., would be important for future advances in the field?
What role can NASA partnerships with the private sector and philanthropic organizations play in advancing our understanding of the technosignatures field?
"If we can find technosignatures— evidence of some technology that modifies its environment in ways that are detectable– then we will be permitted to infer the existence, at least at some time, of intelligent technologists. As with biosignatures, it is not possible to enumerate all the potential technosignatures of technology- as-we-don’t-yet-know-it, but we can define systematic search strategies for equivalents of some 21st century terrestrial technologies."
"The technical challenges are many. What sorts of technosignatures would an extraterrestrial technological species generate? Which of those are detectable? How will we know if we have found one? If we find it, how can we be sure it's a sign of technology and not something unexpected but natural?"
"These have many advantages: they are obviously artificial, they are one of the cheapest and easiest ways to transmit information over long distances, they don't require any extrapolation in technology from ours to generate, and we can detect even quite weak signals at interstellar distances. Other common technosignatures are lasers—either pulses or continuous beams—which have many of the same advantages. Both technosignatures were proposed almost 50 years ago, and most of the work done on technosignatures so far has been looking for them."
"Astro-physicists...spent decades studying and searching for black holes before accumulating today’s compelling evidence that they exist. The same can be said for the search for room-temperature superconductors, proton decay, violations of special relativity, or for that matter the Higgs boson. Indeed, much of the most important and exciting research in astronomy and physics is concerned exactly with the study of objects or phenomena whose existence has not been demonstrated — and that may, in fact, turn out not to exist. In this sense astrobiology merely confronts what is a familiar, even commonplace situation in many of its sister sciences."
"Despite being 50 years old, SETI (or, if you like, searches for technosignatures) is in many ways still in its infancy. There has not been very much searching compared to searches for other things (dark matter, black holes, microbial life, etc.) because of the historical lack of funding; there hasn't even been that much quantitative, foundational work about what technosignatures to search for! Most of the work so far has been people thinking about what work they would do if they had funding. Hopefully, we'll soon be able to start putting those ideas into practice!"
