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Astrobiology Perspectives on Life of the Universe
Series Editors: Richard Gordon and Joseph Seckbach
In his 1687 book Principia, Isaac Newton showed how a body launched atop a tall mountain parallel to the ground would circle the Earth. Many of us are old enough to have witnessed the realization of this dream in the launch of Sputnik in 1957. Since then our ability to enter, view and understand the Universe has increased dramatically. A great race is on to discover real extraterrestrial life, and to understand our origins, whether on Earth or elsewhere. We take part of the title for this new series of books from the pioneering thoughts of Svante Arrhenius, who reviewed this quest in his 1909 book The Life of the Universe as Conceived by Man from the Earliest Ages to the Present Time. The volumes in Astrobiology Perspectives on Life of the Universe will each delve into an aspect of this adventure, with chapters by those who are involved in it, as well as careful observers and assessors of our progress. Guest editors are invited from time to time, and all chapters are peer-reviewed.
Publishers at Scrivener
Martin Scrivener ([email protected])
Phillip Carmical ([email protected])
Technosignatures for Detecting Intelligent Life in Our Universe
A Research Companion
Edited by
Anamaria Berea
Dept. of Data and Computational Sciences, George Mason University, Virginia, USA
This edition first published 2022 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA and Scrivener Publishing LLC, 100 Cummings Center, Suite 541J, Beverly, MA 01915, USA
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
ISBN 978-1-119-64040-0
Cover image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dyson_Sphere_Render.png
Cover design by Russell Richardson
Set in size of 11pt and Minion Pro by Manila Typesetting Company, Makati, Philippines
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Preface
Technosignature is a term that encompasses the idea of searching for intelligent, technological signatures of civilizations other than ours in the universe. A term that would probably be more familiar to the larger audience would be SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence). Technosignatures are the technological equivalent of biosignatures and a subset of biosignatures, which represent evidence of alien life, whether it is intelligent or not. They represent any signals that can be collected from the universe, such as radio wavelengths, optical signals, and many more, that can be potential candidates as signals emitted intentionally from another part of the universe that is not Earth.
This book—Technosignatures for Detecting Intelligent Life in Our Universe: A Research Companion—represents a collection of works by a wide diversity of researchers who have been in this field for a long time. While there have been several books written on the subject in the past, this is the newest research that we have to date in the field, and it by no means represents all aspects of technosignatures research. But this book does give us a good lens into the current state-of-the-art in the field. At the same time, it spreads across a wide range of other fields that are tangential or are used for SETI—from history and economics to communication, photometry, statistics, data science, astrobiology, exoplanetary science, and many more.
Some of the most important debates, when searching for life beyond our planet, have been around the definitions of life and intelligence. While we don’t have very accurate or universally agreed upon definitions for either of these monumentally important concepts, we can recognize, in general, what is life is and what intelligence is, especially on our planet. And, in general, we assume there is no intelligence without life, as we also consider artificial intelligence to be an extension and a byproduct of intelligent biological life. In fact, if biosignatures are signatures of life, in general, technosignatures are signatures of intelligent life, whether this life is biological, artificial, or even extinct. There are many voices in the community that are arguing that actually, in case we do find technosignatures, it is more likely that they will be some forms of artificial intelligence or signs of current or extinct civilizations.
At the same time, let’s not forget what Arthur C. Clarke said, that if