How Far Away Could We Detect… Ourselves?

New research asks if an ETI with our current level of technology could detect our technosignatures, and from how far away. Image Credit: SETI Institute

Revelations from the past can seem quaint once we’ve been living with them for a generation or two. That’s true of the realization in the past that spawned SETI: the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Humanity realized that if we’re blasting radio signals out into the cosmos haphazardly, then other ETIs, if they exist, are probably doing the same.

It seems obvious now, but back then, it was a revelation. So, we set up our radio antennae and began scanning the skies.

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NASA Uses Powerful Transmitters to Talk to Deep Space Spacecraft. Will Other Civilizations Receive Those Signals?

Artist rendition of Voyager 1 entering interstellar space. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

In a recent study submitted to the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, a pair of researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) examine the likelihood of extraterrestrial intelligent civilizations intercepting outward transmissions from NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) that are aimed at five deep space spacecraft: Voyager 1, Voyager 2, Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, and New Horizons. Members of the public are free to track such transmissions at DSN Now, which displays real-time data of outgoing and incoming transmissions to all spacecraft at various times.

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Snooping on Alien Messages Passing Through the Solar System

Researchers at Penn State University have studied a new technique that could use a star’s ability to focus and magnify communications which could be passing through our own solar system, and has been accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal and was part of a graduate course at Penn State covering the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI. The study describes our Sun as potentially acting as a kind of node as part of an interstellar communication network involving probes or relays near our Sun, acting like cellular telephone towers in space.

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