The Alien Observatory–“Advanced Civilization on Another Planet Should Be Generating Electromagnetic Signals”



Could there be another planet in the universe with a society at the same stage of technological advancement as ours? Astrophysics initially wasn’t Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne physicist Claudio Grimaldi’s thing; he was interested more in the physics of condensed matter. Working at EPFL’s Laboratory of Physics of Complex Matter, his research involved calculating the probabilities of carbon nanotubes exchanging electrons. But then he wondered: If the nanotubes were stars and the electrons were signals generated by extraterrestrial societies, could we calculate the probability of detecting those signals more accurately?