Technosignatures
We've been looking for alien life the wrong way. For decades, SETI pointed radio telescopes at the sky, listening for deliberate messages from extraterrestrial civilizations. But what if they're not broadcasting? What if they're just...building things?
Freeman Dyson realized this in the 1960s: advanced civilizations leave fingerprints. They engineer at scales that alter their environment in detectable ways. Megastructures around stars. Atmospheric pollution from industry. Gravitational wave signatures from massive construction. You don't need to catch an alien in the act of trying to communicate. You just need to catch them in the act of existing.
This is technosignature science: the search for non-natural phenomena that betray the presence of technology, anywhere in the observable universe.
Why This Matters for Coherence
Life is coherence maintaining itself against entropy. Technology is life extending that coherence through tools and infrastructure. Technosignatures are coherence writ so large it becomes visible across light-years.
Understanding what counts as a technosignature requires understanding what coherence looks like at civilization scale, what kinds of organization resist natural explanation, and what universal principles might govern any system that maintains complexity over time.
What This Series Covers
This series explores modern technosignature science and its implications for understanding life, intelligence, and coherence at cosmic scales. We'll examine:
- The shift from message-hunting to megastructure-searching
- What current telescopes can actually detect
- The possibility that artifacts from other civilizations already exist in our solar system
- How assembly theory provides a universal biosignature
- Gravitational waves as a new search channel
- The implications of the Fermi Paradox and the Great Silence
- What happens the day we actually detect something
By the end of this series, you'll understand why the question "Are we alone?" is being answered with instruments and mathematics, not speculation—and what those answers might mean for understanding coherence, complexity, and meaning on cosmic scales.
Articles in This Series
Comments ()