By David Warner 
For many years, when scientists talked about finding life on other planets, they were usually looking for “biosignatures.” These are signs of life itself, like oxygen or methane gas, that living things might produce. But in recent years, the conversation has shifted to something new, and perhaps even more exciting: “technosignatures.” Instead of just looking for life, we are starting to look for signs of technology.
A technosignature is any measurable evidence that a civilization with technology has existed, or still exists. This could be anything from a radio broadcast to industrial pollution in a planet’s air, or even a massive structure built in space. The search for these signals is a core part of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI. While this search has been going on for decades, the year 2026 marks a major turning point.
We are entering a new era where our tools are finally powerful enough to stop just passively listening and start actively, and systematically, hunting. A new generation of giant telescopes, combined with incredibly smart artificial intelligence, is coming online. These systems will scan the sky faster, wider, and in more detail than ever before. So, what are these new tools, and how will they hunt for these amazing signals?
Before we look at the new tools, it is important to understand what we are searching for. A “biosignature” is a sign of biology, like finding oxygen in an atmosphere. This is exciting, but it can also be tricky. A non-living process, like a chemical reaction in a planet’s ocean, might also create oxygen, leading to a “false positive.” A technosignature is different. It is a sign that is so unusual, so artificial, that it is very difficult for nature to create on its own. Finding one would be a much stronger case for intelligent life.
Scientists are looking for several different types of technosignatures. The most famous one is radio signals. We have been listening for these for over sixty years. The idea is that an advanced civilization might use radio waves for communication, just as we do for Wi-Fi, television, and GPS. We are not listening for “hello,” but for a specific kind of signal, called “narrow-band,” that stands out from the natural static of space. Nature makes noise across all frequencies, but a transmitter creates a strong signal on one tiny, specific frequency.
Another type is an optical signal, or a laser. A civilization might use giant, powerful lasers to communicate over vast distances or even to push spacecraft with “light sails.” To us, this would look like an impossibly bright and brief flash of single-color light from a star system. We are also looking for more permanent signs. This could be artificial light from cities on the night side of a planet. Or it could be industrial pollution in an atmosphere. If we use a powerful telescope to look at a planet’s air and find chemicals that only factories can make, that would be a stunning discovery. Finally, we are looking for giant structures, or “megastructures.” A very advanced civilization might build enormous solar panel farms around its star to collect energy. These structures, sometimes called Dyson swarms, would block the star’s light in a strange, irregular way.
The year 2026 is not just another year in this search; many in the scientific community see it as the beginning of a new chapter. In fact, the International Astronomical Union, one of the world’s leading groups of astronomers, is holding a major meeting in March 2026 specifically to discuss “Advancing the Search for Technosignatures.” This is happening because we are finally at a point where three powerful forces are coming together at the same time: new telescopes, mature tools, and powerful artificial intelligence.
First, we have brand new, game-changing observatories. The most important one is the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile. This facility is set to begin its full 10-year mission, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), right around this 2025–2026 period. The Rubin Observatory is a new kind of telescope. It has a huge mirror and the largest digital camera ever built, and its job is to scan the entire visible night sky every few nights. This is something we have never been able to do before. It will create a massive, 10-year movie of the universe, and its ability to spot things that “change” or “flash” is perfect for finding technosignatures like lasers or orbiting megastructures.
Second, our other powerful tools, like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), are now fully operational and hitting their stride. JWST is not new, but in 2026, we are masters of using it. Scientists are using it right now to do the amazing work of studying the air of planets orbiting other stars. This is no longer science fiction. We are actively collecting data that could reveal the chemical “barcodes” of industrial pollution. We are moving from theory to real observation.
Third, and perhaps most important, is the rise of artificial intelligence. These new telescopes, especially Rubin, are creating a “data deluge.” They will produce more data in one night than humans could possibly look through in a lifetime. We are talking about petabytes of information. The only way to find the “needle in the haystack” is to use advanced machine learning. In 2026, our AI is finally smart enough to be our partner. We can train it to spot “anomalies”—anything weird, unnatural, or different—and flag it for scientists to review. Without AI, the new search would be impossible.
One of the most exciting new searches is for optical signals, often called Optical SETI (OSETI). The idea is that while radio is useful, a truly advanced civilization might prefer lasers for communication. Why? A laser beam is highly focused and can carry enormous amounts of information, far more than a radio wave. Think of it as upgrading from an old dial-up modem to a modern fiber-optic cable. An alien civilization might use a network of powerful lasers to communicate between its home world and colonies on other planets. Or, it might use an incredibly powerful laser as an engine, pointing it at a “light sail” to push a starship to incredible speeds.
So, how do we find such a flash? To us, it would look like a star suddenly becoming intensely bright for just a tiny fraction of a second. This is where the Vera C. Rubin Observatory becomes our primary tool. Its 10-year survey is designed to find “transients,” which is the official name for anything that flashes or changes in brightness. As it scans the whole sky over and over, its software will compare each new picture to the last one. If a star is suddenly there that was not there before, or if one star suddenly flashes, the system will flag it instantly.
But we also have a second, more specialized hunt called LaserSETI. This project, which is installing its new instruments at sites around the world in 2026, is designed to do one thing and do it perfectly: find single-color flashes. The LaserSETI instruments use a special grating that splits all light into a rainbow. A natural star, like our sun, gives off light in a full rainbow of colors. But a laser is “monochromatic,” meaning it shines in only one, pure color. When the LaserSETI camera sees a star, it sees a rainbow. But if it sees a laser, it will just see one single, bright line of color. This makes it very easy to tell the difference and ignore false alarms. By placing these cameras all over the world, scientists can watch the entire night sky, all the time, ensuring we never miss that one brief, artificial flash.
This might be the most promising search method of all, and it is happening right now thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). This method does not require a civilization to send us a message. We just have to find them going about their daily lives, even if they are messy. We are looking for industrial pollution in the atmosphere of an exoplanet, a planet orbiting another star. On Earth, our industrial revolution has pumped chemicals into the air that do not exist in nature. If we can find these same chemicals on another world, it would be almost impossible to explain as a natural event.
The method we use is called “transit spectroscopy.” It sounds complex, but the idea is simple. We wait for a planet to pass in front of its star, an event called a “transit.” As the planet crosses, a tiny bit of the starlight shines through the planet’s atmosphere on its way to us. We use JWST to catch that light and spread it out into a spectrum, like a chemical “barcode.” Every gas in the atmosphere, whether oxygen, water, or something else, blocks light at a very specific color, leaving a black line in the barcode. By reading this barcode, we can tell exactly what is in that planet’s air, even from light-years away.
The number one technosignature we are looking for is a group of chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs. On Earth, we invented CFCs in the 20th century for use in refrigerators and aerosol cans. They do not occur naturally, but they are extremely good at trapping heat and are very, very easy to see with an infrared telescope like JWST. Finding CFCs in the air of a distant planet would be a “smoking gun” for an industrial civilization. We are also looking for other pollutants like nitrogen dioxide (NO2), a gas that comes from burning fossil fuels. This one is less certain, as volcanoes can also produce it. But finding a planet with high levels of both CFCs and NO2 would be a powerful sign of technology. In 2026, scientists are actively using JWST to scan the most promising planets, like those in the nearby TRAPPIST-1 system, looking for these very barcodes.
This idea comes straight from science fiction, but it is based on a very real and logical idea. As a civilization becomes more advanced, its need for energy grows. Eventually, a civilization might need more energy than its planet can provide. The next logical step is to get that energy directly from its star. They might do this by building a “Dyson Swarm,” which is a massive cloud of millions of individual solar panels and habitats orbiting their star to capture a huge fraction of its energy. This is not a solid shell, but a gigantic, “messy” construction project.
We have two main ways to find such a structure, and our 2026 tools are perfect for both. The first method is by looking for strange “dimming” of a star. As this swarm of structures orbits, it would block the star’s light. But unlike a planet, which is a solid ball and blocks the same amount of light in a regular, repeating pattern, a Dyson Swarm would be chaotic. The star’s light would dim and brighten in a weird, irregular, and unnatural way. This is exactly what the Vera C. Rubin Observatory was built to find. Its 10-year survey will measure the brightness of billions of stars, over and over. Its AI will be trained to flag any star that is “blinking” in a strange, non-periodic way, just as a megastructure might.
The second method is even more clever: we look for waste heat. A basic law of physics (thermodynamics) says that any machine that uses energy is not perfectly efficient. It will always produce waste heat. Now, imagine a structure billions of times larger than any on Earth, capturing a huge amount of starlight. It would get very hot. These structures would absorb visible starlight, but they would glow in infrared light, which is heat radiation. We would search for a star that looks strangely dim in visible light but is surrounded by an enormous, unexplained glow of infrared heat. It would be like seeing a star that is “wearing a hot coat.” Our infrared telescopes, like JWST and the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), are perfect for scanning the sky and finding these “too hot” stars, flagging them as prime targets for a technosignature.
Absolutely. The classic search for radio signals, which began in 1960, is still one of the most important parts of the search for technosignatures. In fact, it is stronger and smarter in 2026 than it has ever been. The main idea has not changed: we are listening for a specific, artificial signal that stands out from the natural background noise of the galaxy. Nature, like supernovas and spinning stars, tends to create “broadband” radio noise, like static on an AM/FM radio that covers all the stations at once. A technological signal, however, would be “narrow-band,” like a single radio station broadcasting on one exact frequency.
The challenge has always been twofold: where to look, and how to filter out our own noise. Earth is an incredibly “loud” planet, broadcasting Wi-Fi, GPS, cell phone signals, and television 24/7. This is called Radio Frequency Interference (RFI). In the past, this RFI could easily be mistaken for an alien signal. But our 2026 projects are built to solve this. The SETI Institute’s Allen Telescope Array (ATA) in California is a dedicated observatory that can look at multiple targets at once. Its new systems can instantly check a signal. If the signal is seen by all its dishes at the same time and seems to be “stationary,” it is from Earth. But if the signal appears to move across the sky at the same speed as the stars, it is coming from deep space.
Even more powerful is the Breakthrough Listen initiative, the largest SETI project in history. It uses time on the world’s biggest telescopes, like MeerKAT in South Africa. And new projects like COSMIC, which is attached to the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico, are “piggybacking” on other astronomy. This means that while astronomers are studying a distant galaxy, the COSMIC system is searching that same data, in real-time, for any technosignature signals. This massively increases the amount of time we are “listening” to the sky. With these new tools, we are no longer just pointing a single telescope at a single star; we are scanning millions of stars at once, with smart systems that can tell the difference between a local cell phone and a potential call from the cosmos.
If the new telescopes are the eyes of the 2026 search, then artificial intelligence is the brain. Without AI, the search for technosignatures would come to a grinding halt. The problem is simple: we are about to be flooded with information on a scale humanity has never seen before. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, for example, will produce about 20 terabytes of data every single night. That is like 10,000 movies’ worth of data daily. A human, or even a large team of humans, could never hope to examine all of it. We would miss the tiny, fleeting signals we are looking for.
This is where machine learning comes in. In 2026, we are deploying AI in two different ways. The first way is as a “filter.” We can train an AI by feeding it millions of examples of “normal” signals. We show it what a star looks like, what a planet looks like, what a regular pulsar looks like, and what a piece of Earth’s radio interference looks like. The AI learns to recognize all the “normal” or “boring” stuff. Then, we set it loose on the new data. Its job is to automatically identify and throw away 99.99% of the data that it knows is natural, leaving only a tiny handful of “weird” or “anomalous” signals for human scientists to investigate.
The second method is even more powerful and is known as “anomaly detection.” In this case, we do not tell the AI what to look for. We do not train it on what is normal. Instead, we just give it all the data and ask it to find patterns. The AI looks for any signal or event that is complex, repeating, or structured in a way that does not match anything else in the dataset. This is so exciting because it opens the door to finding a technosignature we have not even imagined. We are mostly looking for signals based on our own technology, like radio and lasers. But what if a civilization communicates in a way we cannot even comprehend? A powerful AI, free from human bias, might be able to spot that truly alien signal in the data—a signal we would have stared right at and never recognized.
The search for technosignatures in 2026 is not just one search; it is a powerful, combined effort. We are scanning the sky for the quick flashes of alien lasers with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. We are using the James Webb Space Telescope to “sniff” the air of distant worlds for the telltale signs of industrial pollution. We are listening with upgraded radio arrays like the ATA and VLA for that one, narrow-band signal that cuts through the static of space. And we are hunting for the heat shadows of giant megastructures orbiting faraway stars.
Holding this entire, massive effort together is artificial intelligence, which acts as the ultimate partner, sorting through mountains of data to find the one signal that does not belong. For the first time, we are moving from passively hoping to find something to actively and systematically searching the sky with tools built for the job. We may not find anything tomorrow, but the hunt has truly begun. If we do find a signal in 2026, what do you think our first response should be?
A biosignature is a sign of life, such as oxygen or methane gas, which could be produced by simple microbes. A technosignature is a sign of technology, such as a radio signal, a laser, or an industrial chemical like CFCs, which can only be produced by an intelligent, industrial civilization.
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is a new, large telescope in Chile that will begin a 10-year survey of the entire night sky around 2025–2026. Its job is to take a “movie” of the universe, making it perfect for finding things that flash (like lasers) or change brightness (like megastructures).
Yes. By using a method called transit spectroscopy, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can analyze the starlight that passes through a planet’s atmosphere. This allows it to detect the “chemical barcode” of gases in that air, including artificial pollutants like CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) from an industrial society.
A Dyson Sphere, or more accurately a “Dyson Swarm,” is a hypothetical megastructure that an advanced civilization might build around its star. It would consist of a massive cloud of solar collectors or habitats designed to capture a large amount of the star’s energy.
A powerful laser beam is a very efficient way to communicate across the vast distances of space, as it can carry much more information than a radio wave. A civilization might also use giant lasers to power “light sail” spacecraft, so we look for these brief, intense flashes of light.
The most famous potential signal is the “Wow!” signal, detected in 1977 by a radio telescope. It was a very strong, narrow-band signal that lasted for 72 seconds and came from the direction of the constellation Sagittarius. It perfectly matched what we were looking for, but it was never, ever heard again.
It is a key year because new, powerful tools like the Vera C. Rubin Observatory are beginning their main surveys. This is combined with the advanced power of the James Webb Space Telescope and new AI systems that can analyze the massive amounts of data these telescopes produce.
CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) are artificial chemicals that, on Earth, were used in refrigerators and aerosol sprays. As far as we know, they are not produced by any natural process, so finding them in a planet’s atmosphere would be an extremely strong, almost certain sign of an industrial civilization.
Telescopes in 2026 produce far too much data for humans to check. Artificial intelligence (AI) helps by automatically filtering out all the “normal” data (stars, planets, etc.) and flagging only the “anomalous” or weird signals for scientists to look at, so we do not miss the needle in the haystack.
There is a set of “post-detection protocols” that scientists would follow. The first step is to verify the signal, making sure it is not from Earth or a new natural event. This means asking other telescopes around the world to look. Only after it is 100% verified would the discovery be announced to the public.