David Kipping

But they could equally be a giant fungus that doesn't even understand the idea of socialization because it's the only entity on its planet.

It just

swells over the entire surface.

And it's incredibly intelligent because maybe each node communicates with each other to create essentially a giant neural net, but it has no sense of what communication even is.

And so alien life that's out there is surely going to be extremely diverse.

I'm pretty skeptical that we'll ever get

that fantasy moment I always had as a kid of having a dialogue within the civilization.

That's a hard question to answer because we are essentially engaging in xenopsychology to some degree.

What are the activities of another civilization

But a lot of that is inevitable.

Maybe I'm just fabricating that word really, but they're trying to guess at the machinations and motivations of another intelligent being that was completely evolutionary divorced from us.

Yeah, alien psychology is another way of maybe making it more grounded, but...

We can't really guess at their motivations too well, but we can look at the sorts of behaviors we engage in and at least look for them.

We're always guilty that when we look for biosignatures, we're really looking for, and even when we look for planets, we're looking for templates of Earth.

When we look for biosignatures, we're looking for templates of Earth-based life.

When we look for tetanus signatures, we tend to be looking for templates of our own behaviors or extrapolations of our behaviors.

There's a very long list of technosignatures that people have suggested we could look for.

The earliest ones were, of course, radio beacons.

That was Project Osmer that Frank Drake was involved in, trying to look for radio signatures, which could either be just blurting out high-power radio signals saying, hey, we're here, or could even have encoded within them

galactic encyclopedias for us to unlock, which has always been the allure of the radio technique.