Alien Technologies

Nobody comes. Nobody answers. Nobody notices us. Alien Technologies takes seriously the pictures that film, novels, comics, and games have been drawing of alien technology for sixty years – and holds them up against physics. The book starts with what we can measure: thousands of exoplanets, the composition of distant atmospheres, the distances and zones of our galaxy. Then it tells a story: an archivist, working nights through forty years of old sky data, finds a signal built so that it can be read. Part three tests, chapter by chapter, what an alien technosphere would have to be: energy, audibility, time, material, blueprint, chemistry, intent. And part four turns the telescope around and asks who out there is really transmitting – living beings, or what they built. With 31 figures, 30 annotated images from science fiction, a glossary, a table of instruments, and five predictions you can check.