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Advanced aliens could be chatting with each other using light flashes in plain sight, similar to how fireflies communicate, according to a new study that could lead to new approaches in finding extraterrestrial civilisations.
Until now, astronomers have mainly been trying to detect advanced aliens by looking for odd radio signals from distant planets and peculiar heat signatures indicative of advanced technology.
However, this approach may have a human-centric bias, ie, trying to understand ET entities through a distinctly human lens, and may not account for potential civilisations which could be completely different from ours, say researchers from the Arizona State University.
In the new thought experiment, they propose a whole new way in which advanced aliens could potentially be communicating with other ET civilisations.
Fireflies communicate using patterns of light flashes, which stand out from their environment and from other fireflies. Each firefly species has evolved to have flash patterns that are different from others, enabling members of a species to recognise each other.
Even though fireflies do not understand what these flashes convey, their patterns can signal the presence of each firefly and its identity against a noisy natural background.
Similarly, advanced aliens may also be flashing signals in a binary on/off flash pattern, which may not have any specific meaning, but could just stand out from the natural cosmic background of bright stars and galaxies, scientists say.
“Extraterrestrial signals may also be identifiable not by their complexity or decodable content, but by the structural properties of the signal,” researchers write in the yet-to-be peer-reviewed study posted in arXiv.
Scientists developed a firefly-inspired model to explore how intelligent aliens might generate signals that are distinct from their background, but do not carry any decoded meaning.
One of the brightest background objects in the cosmos is a pulsar, which is a spinning neutron star that emits regular pulses of predictable and periodic radio waves.
Researchers simulated signals from about 150 known pulsars and generated an artificial signal that stands out from such a pulsar background.
They also accounted for the energy required to produce such a signal.
This helped scientists estimate the kind of artificial signal most distinct from the pulsar background in space that could be produced by advanced aliens with reasonably low energy.
Scientists found that artificial signals could be generated considerably more distinct from the pulsar population by an advanced alien civilisation.
This means any detectable alien communication doesn’t have to be meaningful to us but only needs to be unlikely to happen by chance in nature, researchers say.
“Our model demonstrates that alien signals need not be inherently complicated nor need we decipher their meaning to identify them,” they write.
