Years ago I visited Freeman Dyson in his office at the Institute For Advanced Study, in Princeton, and we had a long conversation about extraterrestrial intelligence, SETI, Carl Sagan and human destiny (we will use genetic engineering to adapt ourselves to alien environments, so that we can live not only on Mars and the Jovian moons but also on the countless cometary bodies of the Oort Cloud). (Though I’m trying to square that with the realization that I can barely make it out to Home Depot.) At one point in the conversation, Dyson postulated the most likely scenario for discovering an alien civilization: We’ll just see something in a telescope that’s clearly artificial. [I believe all this is somewhere in CBA.] Dyson’s prediction came to mind yesterday when I read about a new paper from scientists who believe that we could, in theory, detect cities on alien worlds. The key is to look for signs of artificially lit worlds — metropolitan areas lit up at night the way our own terrestrial Gothams are.
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