Alien hunters search for extraterrestrial pollution in bid to find new life

Are aliens real? That’s something human beings have been wondering for decades, maybe even centuries, spurring humanity’s search for life. It seems people looking for extraterrestrials are resorting to new ways to find them, like using technosignatures to find alien pollution.

Obviously, we want to know if extraterrestrials exist, since it’s such a fun concept that sci-fi movies have made appealing. Will human beings eventually use these technosignatures to find alien pollution that may have landed on Earth? Let’s hope so.

Will technosignatures help us find aliens?

SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) was rebranded on 2018 when NASA revealed a Technosignatures Workshop in Houston, Texas, getting interest. Both alien hunters and legit scientists gained interest in SETI when the company switched its focus from sending aliens signals to wondering how they live.

Adam Frank, one of the scientists who gained interest in SETI, thinks that finding out how aliens live is fascinating. Now that SETI is moving away from sending aliens radio signals, the hope is we find their technology and pollution so we can analyze their lifestyle.

"It’s much more interesting to look for things like climate change, things that just happen if you are a civilization," Frank tells Aeon.

Read More: NASA is creating an army of Alien-hunting space drones

Alien technology could be billions years old

Many might be wondering why these scientists have to use technosignatures to look for alien pollutants and that’s because their technology might be really old. In fact, there’s a good chance that they could be a million or a billion years old, which is exactly what those sci-fi movies told us.

Only time will tell if this ends up being true, as finding aliens has proven to be more difficult than finding a needle in a haystack. Hopefully, this leads us to eventual communication with aliens, since it would be really cool to see.