A thought-provoking study questions our human-centric approach of looking for extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) and advocates for the expansion of the search to the realm of the non-human.
We have been looking for aliens for a long time with no success. A new study suggests that the reason may be an anthropocentric bias in our approach.
Take, for instance, Project Ozma in 1960, the first modern attempt at detecting interstellar radio transmissions, which was informed by the progress we had made ourselves in the field of radio communication. We were essentially trying to look for familiar signs from a hypothetical species we knew nothing about. We were, in a way, looking for ourselves.
Consider this: What if the species we were looking for back then was already a hundred years ahead of us in terms of technological development? The Earth itself has become less “radio loud” since the 1960s. This is largely thanks to the shift from high-powered, omnidirectional television broadcasts to highly targeted, low-power satellite beams and enclosed fiber-optic internet cables. It’s true that the search for possible technosignatures has expanded to include laser transmissions, neutrinos, and gravitational waves. But we’ve still had no luck.
"SETI has traditionally spanned two extremes: an anthropocentric search for human-like technosignatures and an anomaly-based search for signals that deviate from known astrophysics," co-author Estelle Janin told Universe Today. She is a PhD candidate at the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University.
The alternative that Janin and her teammates propose de-centers the human in that it considers including non-human modes of communication in the search.
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