Decades after Enrico Fermi’s uttered his famous words – “Where is everybody?” – the Paradox that bears his name still haunts us. Despite repeated attempts to locate radio signals coming from space and our ongoing efforts to find visible indications of alien civilizations in distant star systems, the search extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI) has yet to produce anything substantive.
But as history has taught us, failure has a way of stimulated new and interesting ideas. For example, in a recently-published paper, Dr. Duncan H. Forgan of St. Andrews University proposed that extra-terrestrial civilizations could be communicating with each other by creating artificial transits of their respective stars. This sort of “galactic internet” could be how advanced species are attempting to signal us right now.
Forgan’s paper, “Exoplanet Transits as the Foundation of an Interstellar Communications Network“, was recently published online. In addition to being a research fellow at the School of Physics and Astronomy and the Scottish Universities Physics Alliance at the University of St Andrews (Scotland’s oldest academic institution), he is also a member of the St Andrews Center for Exoplanet Science.
[video=youtube;8v4SRfmoTuU]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8v4SRfmoTuU[/video]
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