Big discoveries in science are often made when innovative instruments probe nature in new ways. Laser SETI will search the sky for a variety of pulsed light signals that might have been overlooked before. They may find ET, and also may find new physics.
The SETI Institute says it "is hard to describe the level of excitement we feel about this search. We will be probing nature in a new way, looking where no one has looked before. Who knows what we may find? We might find evidence for an extraterrestrial civilization, and this is our greatest hope. We also might find some kind of unexpected natural optical signal revealing new physics. In the latter case, we'll just have to console ourselves with a Nobel Prize."
SETI scientists spend most of their time looking for themselves. That is, we tend to look for the kinds of radio or light signals that we generate on Earth. For example, when Frank Drake began the first SETI observations in 1960, he chose to look for signals similar to those for AM radio broadcasting. It seemed to make sense that if humans use AM radio to communicate, then ET might do the same.
But there is a vast menagerie of methods to encode sound into a radio signal, for example, using pulses. Drake did not look for short pulses. If he had he might have discovered a kind of neutron star called a pulsar (figure 1), discovered in 1967 by Jocelyn Bell and earning a Nobel Prize for her postdoctoral advisor, Anthony Hewish.
Drake might be forgiven for not discovering pulsars. While the electronics in Drake's and Bell's telescopes were similar, the designs of their telescopes were vastly different from one another. In order to be very good at discovering carrier-wave like signals, Drake's telescope sacrificed sensitivity to rapidly variable sources. The opposite was true for Bell's telescope. Neither one of Drake's nor Bell's telescopes could have replaced the other. In science, specialization is often the key to success.
You might imagine that after the first 70 years of radio astronomy we would have noticed all the types of radio signals that nature has to offer. But you would be wrong. In 2008 Duncan Lorimer and coworkers discovered a completely new kind of radio signal we now call the fast radio burst or FRB.
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