A team of astronomers, engineers, and physicists from the University of Hawaii, the University of Freiburg, and elsewhere has proposed a new and powerful technique to search for intelligent life.
Rather than looking for radio waves, the team suggests searching for the heat signatures of nearby planets, which requires a giant telescope that could detect infrared radiation directly from an exoplanet, thus revealing the presence of a civilization.
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"The energy footprint of life and civilization appears as infrared heat radiation. A convenient way to describe the strength of this signal is in terms of total stellar power that is incident on the host planet," said Jeff R. Kuhn of the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy, the project's lead scientist.
This is at least as good of a strategy as looking for radio waves. To read more, click here.