Looking for Aliens in the Wrong Direction

A theory launched by Gregory Benford, UC Irvine astrophysicist, and his brother James, a physicist specializing in high-powered microwave technology, says that alien signals are most likely to be transmitted as pulsed signals, narrowly directed and in the 1-10 gigahertz range.

For the last 50 years, people became more and more fascinated by the possibility of capturing alien signals from other planets. But until now, the efforts of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California have shown no results. Logically, the SETI team has begun to question its methods.

The Benford brothers' theory started to gather more and more adepts. They published two studies in the June issue of the journal Astrobiology, along with James' son Dominic, a scientist at NASA, and their starting point is the cost of space transmissions.

Gregory Benford says that “broadcasting is expensive, and transmitting signals across light-years would require considerable resources.” Even if some alien civilization managed to make an efficient signaling technology, with reduced costs and limited waste, these signals would not be transmitted no matter how in every direction. It is more plausible that they would be pulsed and within 1 to 10 gigahertz range. James Benford, who is also founder and president of Microwave Sciences Inc. in Lafayette, California, says that this new approach “is more like Twitter and less like War and Peace.”

This new theory has got an increasing support so far. Cosmologist Paul Davies supports it in his book “The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence”, and Astronomy Now has insured large coverage of the story.

SETI might change tactics and look for alien pulsed signals coming from the Milky Way galaxy's center, as 90 percent of its stars are clustered. Gregory Benford says that “the stars there are a billion years older than our sun, which suggests a greater possibility of contact with an advanced civilization than does pointing SETI receivers outward to the newer and less crowded edge of our galaxy.”

Nobody knows for sure that this is the right method, or that there are even other civilizations out there, but hopefully one day we will have an answer.