We’ve been looking for life. Here’s why we should look for intelligence instead

As humans, it's so hard to think outside of the box, outside of who we are

We are looking for life beyond Earth in all kinds of ways

It's so hard to imagine things that aren't already part of our lives. It's really, really hard to extrapolate

So one idea is people like to look for anomalies. Like you look in data for spurious signals, signals that aren't something that we normally see

In the movie Contact, the character that plays Jill Tartar

eventually gets a message on the radio telescope that's a distinctive message from another intelligent civilization

That is like our gold standard, because we're not going to just get a random signal from the universe

that's ordered in a certain way. But we have to get lucky that someone's actually beaming a signal right to us

and it's just hard to search the whole sky constantly. A technosignature is a sign of intelligent life that has technological capability

We have a lot of those in our atmosphere that could potentially be detected from far away

A technosignature could also be swarms of satellites. There could be city lights or large structures that have been built

and one more very popular one is a radio message a radio signal like a purposeful message Living right now with AI accelerating in its so intelligence it terrifying in a way really And so it really fresh on our minds

We're starting to have a signature of AI computer intelligence because we have constellations

of satellites in low-Earth orbit for communications or for Earth observing. so we could look for large shiny objects which would be a sphere or like maybe not a continuous

sphere but like a patchy sphere of satellites around another star and people have literally searched through infrared surveys that already existed

of our sky looking for excess heat like coming off of what would be a dyson sphere and put limits on it

So there are like a giant list of ideas that are slowly being implemented

And so far they haven't turned anything up, but there's still just a scratch at the surface

But another concept in that great filter is that perhaps life evolves to this post-biological intelligence

It's like a frontiers research question about what AI will leave behind

what will it evolve to here on Earth? And what does it mean for potential AI computer type intelligence elsewhere

We're still trying to figure that out