It’s a worry we never used to have. Victorian-era scientists toyed with plans to use lanterns and burning pools of oil to contact postulated Martians. In the 1970s, NASA bolted greeting cards onto spacecraft that will leave our solar system and wander the vast reaches between the stars. The Pioneer and Voyager probes carry plaques and records with information about what humans look like and where Earth is, as well as a small sampling of our culture.This new timidness is interesting, and is more likely a product of our own understanding of our history. Yes, the Europeans were not benevolent people when they arrived on the shores of the Americas and engaged the natives. One can only hope for a better scenario if we encounter a significantly advanced civilization from elsewhere.
But let's say we just want to listen for now. Well, the University of California, San Diego has a new way to find such communications. The near-infrared optical SETI (NIROSETI) instrument will allow astronomers can expand the search for interstallar transmissions in the form of pulses of infrared light. This goes beyond the radio and optical methods we have today. In a press release, the university noted:
Because infrared light penetrates farther through gas and dust than visible light, this new search will extend to stars thousands rather than merely hundreds of light years away. And the success of the Kepler Mission, which has found habitable planets orbiting stars both like and unlike our own, has prompted the new search to look for signals from a wider variety of stars.The NIROSETI instrument has been installed at the University of California's Lick Observatory on Mt. Hamilton (see image above), just east of San Jose. It was put into service last month. Now we just need to start pointing it at specific stars to see what happens.
