A new paper from Jason Wright (Penn State) and colleagues Shubham Kanodia and Emily Lubar deals with SETI and the 'parameter space' within which we search, with interesting implications. For the researchers show that despite searching for decades through a variety of projects and surveys, SETI is in early days indeed. Those who would draw conclusions about its lack of success to this point fail to understand the true dimensions of the challenge. But before getting into the meat of the paper, let's talk about a few items in its introduction. For Wright and team contextualize SETI in relation to broader statements about our place in the cosmos. We can ask questions about what we see and what we don't see, but we have to avoid being too facile in our interpretation of what some consider to be an 'eerie silence' (the reference is to a wonderful book by Paul Davies of the same name). Image: Penn State's Jason Wright. Credit: Jody Barshinger. Back in the 1970s, Michael Hart argued that...

Can rapidly advancing laser technology and optics augment the way we do SETI? At the University of California, Santa Barbara, Phil Lubin believes they can, and he's behind a project called the Trillion Planet Survey to put the idea into practice for the benefit of students. As an incentive for looking into a career in physics, an entire galaxy may be just the ticket. For the target is the nearest galaxy to our own. The Trillion Planet Survey will use a suite of meter-class telescopes to search for continuous wave (CW) laser beacons from M31, the Andromeda galaxy. But TPS is more than a student exercise. The work builds on Lubin's 2016 paper called "The Search for Directed Intelligence," which makes the case that laser technology foreseen today could be seen across the universe. And that issue deserves further comment. Centauri Dreams readers are familiar with Lubin's work with DE-STAR, (Directed Energy Solar Targeting of Asteroids and exploRation), a scalable technology that involves...