How smart aliens would try to contact us
Time: Science-fiction author and physicist Gregory Benford, his twin brother James, and James’s son Dominic have come up with a new proposal for detecting signals beamed into the galaxy by aliens who want to be discovered. According to the Benfords, aliens are most likely to send bursts of pulses now and again, rather than strong continuous beams, which consume far more energy. To find those pulses, the best strategy is to monitor several stars continuously, rather than slowly sweep the entire galaxy. Time‘s Michael Lemonick describes the proposal, which the Benfords wrote to mark the 50th anniversary of the SETI program.