NASA wants to start looking for intelligent aliens who, like us, create technology

For decades, the search for life in space has focused on the search for tiny microbes that would hardly satisfy a growing appetite for connection with beings who resemble us more.

It's the main course's aperitif, a search for sophisticated creatures that truly answer one of the central questions of humanity: are we alone?

Now, thanks to a new interest in Congress for new scientific research, NASA is changing its focus to look for life that is advanced enough to, as we do, create technologies.

The signs are called technosignatures, in relation to biosignatures, as in microbes, which show signs of life. Technosignatures are mainly in the form of radio signals allowing scientists to infer the existence of technological life in the universe.

A proposed US bill in April recommended that NASA receive $ 10 million to work with the private sector and philanthropic organizations to pursue a foreign life. In reality, it would not allocate funds and should still be passed in the House and Senate, but it is the first time in 25 years that the federal government has been considering using funds to seek extraterrestrial life.

The original program, called SETI, or the quest for extraterrestrial intelligence, the federal funding lost in 1993 after a year of research has not become a "little green guy," then said US Senator Richard Bryan of Nevada.

Unlike SETI, NASA argues that the search for technosignatures goes further, focusing on radio or laser emissions, not just on communication signals. Our own radio and television shows have drifted into space, so we could perhaps receive signals from other beings, according to the agency.

And signs of large structures or an atmosphere full of pollutants – like ours – could prove that there is a civilization like that of the Earth elsewhere in the universe.

The question of whether NASA will find life outside our solar system is a hypothesis. Drake's formula of astronomer Frank Drake postulates that there could be 10,000 intelligent civilizations in the galaxy. The Fermi paradox of Italian physicist Enrico Fermi says that if there was an intelligent life out there, we would have met it already.

But the recent discoveries of the Kepler mission on multiple exoplanets, some of which have similarities to the Earth, and the TESS mission, which recently launched a satellite that has already found two new exoplanets, have sparked increased interest in extraterrestrial life. .

It will rather be an irregular radio signal to pass the test. NASA said that to answer the question of our place in the universe, it would require "undeniable signs" of life.

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NASA takes a fresh look at the search for life beyond the Earth