What is the LASERSETI Project?

Scanning the Skies for Alien Technosignatures

Are we alone in the universe? This question is arguably one of the most compelling that humanity has ever asked. For generations, it was the domain of philosophers and storytellers. But in the last half-century, it has become a genuine scientific inquiry. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is the formal effort to find evidence of technological life beyond Earth.

For decades, this search was dominated by a single tool: the radio telescope. The logic was sound. Radio waves travel at the speed of light, pass through the dust and gas clouds of interstellar space with ease, and are relatively cheap, technologically speaking, to generate. Astronomers scanned the skies, “listening” for an artificial, non-random signal from a distant star system. Yet, after more than 60 years of listening, the galaxy remains silent. This “Great Silence” is the heart of the Fermi Paradox: if life is common, why haven’t we heard from anyone?

This silence has prompted scientists to reconsider their assumptions. It’s possible the paradox exists because we’ve been looking in the wrong place or listening on the wrong “channel.” What if an advanced civilization chose a different, more efficient way to communicate across the vastness of space? What if, instead of a cosmic shout, they’re using a cosmic flash?

This idea is the foundation of Optical SETI (OSETI), a branch of the search that looks for light signals instead of radio waves. And at the forefront of this modern approach is a new, innovative project called LASERSETI. It’s an experiment designed to continuously scan the entire night sky for the briefest flash of a laser beam, a potential “hello” from another world. It represents a fundamental shift in strategy, moving from the targeted “listening” of a single star to a “wide-net” watch of the whole sky, all the time.

The Case for Optical SETI

The original logic for radio SETI remains compelling. In 1959, physicists Philip Morrison and Giuseppe Cocconi suggested searching near the 1.42 GHz frequency. This is the natural emission frequency of neutral hydrogen, the most common element in the universe. They reasoned that any civilization, no matter its biology, would know about hydrogen and might choose this “water hole” as a universal hailing frequency.

This led to decades of searches using massive radio telescopes, from the early Project Ozma at Green Bank to the modern, data-intensive surveys run by the SETI Institute and the Breakthrough Listen initiative. These searches are powerful, but they face an immense challenge.

The Limits of Radio

The “water hole” is a good guess, but it’s still just a guess. An alien civilization might choose a completely different frequency. The radio spectrum is gigantically wide, and we have to guess not only the star to listen to but also the frequency to tune into. This is the “cosmic haystack” problem, and it’s multidimensional.

Traditional radio searches also use telescopes that have a very small field of view. The Allen Telescope Array, for example, is a powerful instrument, but it can only look at one small patch of sky at a time. This is known as a “targeted search.” If a signal arrives from a star you aren’t currently pointed at, you’ll miss it. If a signal is a brief “ping” rather than a continuous broadcast, you have to be looking at the right star at the exact right moment. The odds are astronomically small.

The Laser Advantage

The laser was invented in 1960, right after the first radio searches began. It wasn’t long before scientists, including the laser’s inventor Charles Townes, suggested it might be a superior tool for interstellar communication.

The argument for lasers is built on efficiency and information.

First, lasers are highly directional. A radio broadcast, unless sent from an impossibly large antenna, spreads out in all directions. This wastes a tremendous amount of energy. A laser beam, by contrast, can be tightly focused (collimated) and pointed directly at a target system. This means a civilization could send a powerful signal to a specific star, like our Sun, using far less energy than an omnidirectional radio beacon.

Second, lasers are monochromatic, meaning they consist of a single color or wavelength of light. This makes them stand out. A star, like our Sun, emits light across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. A laser signal would be a sharp, unnatural spike of pure color against the messy, broad spectrum of its host star. For a brief moment, a powerful pulsed laser could even outshine its star in that single, narrow wavelength. This makes it an obvious, attention-grabbing technosignature.

Third, lasers have an incredibly high bandwidth. A radio wave “wiggles” at a certain frequency. A light wave “wiggles” a million times faster. This means a laser beam can carry vastly more information per second than a radio beam. A radio signal might be able to send a “we are here” message. A laser signal could send the “Library of Congress” in a matter of minutes. If a civilization wants to do more than just say hello – if they want to send a rich data package – a laser is the obvious choice.

Defining the “Signal”

So, what exactly is an optical SETI project looking for? It’s not a continuous laser beam, like a giant cosmic laser pointer. Maintaining such a beam across interstellar distances would require a staggering amount of power, likely well beyond even a very advanced civilization’s budget.

Instead, the search is for pulses. A civilization could store up energy and release it in a single, brilliant flash lasting only a nanosecond (a billionth of a second). During that nanosecond, the beacon could be billions of times brighter than its star, making it visible across the galaxy.

This is the signal LASERSETI is hunting for: a monochromatic, nanosecond-fast pulse of light. It’s a signal that is very difficult for nature to produce. While phenomena like pulsars create regular radio pulses, and other astrophysical events create bursts of light, nothing known to science creates a nanosecond optical flash. Finding one would be a powerful indicator of technology.

Introducing LASERSETI

This is where the LASERSETI project comes in. It’s a new kind of observatory designed specifically to solve the “soda straw” problem of previous searches and conduct the first-ever, all-sky, all-the-time hunt for these laser flashes.

A New Strategy for an Old Question

LASERSETI, which stands for Laser Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is an experiment developed and operated by the SETI Institute, a non-profit research organization. Its goal is to build a global network of instruments that, together, will monitor the entire night sky.

Previous optical SETI searches, like those conducted at Harvard University by physicist Paul Horowitz, were important pioneers. But they still relied on traditional telescopes. They would point a telescope at a star, attach a fast photometer (light detector), and watch for a flash. This was still a targeted, “soda straw” search.

LASERSETI’s approach is completely different. It’s not a telescope. It’s a camera. Or, more accurately, a set of very sophisticated, very fast, wide-field cameras. Instead of pointing at one star, a LASERSETI instrument stares at a huge patch of the sky – about 75 degrees across – and simply watches.

The “All-Sky, All-the-Time” Problem

The brilliance of the LASERSETI concept, conceived by a team at the SETI Institute led by principal investigator Eliot Gillum, is its solution to the pointing problem. If a signal is a brief flash, you can’t predict when or where it will appear. The only way to be sure you’ll see it is to be looking everywhere, all the time.

This is a massive technological challenge. The sky is huge, and monitoring it for events that last a billionth of a second generates an unbelievable amount of data. It’s also a challenge of false positives. How do you distinguish a real alien signal from all the other things that flash in the night?

LASERSETI is designed to solve both of these problems with a clever hardware design and powerful, real-time software.

Project Origins and Development

The project grew from a realization that consumer and industrial technology had finally caught up to the demands of optical SETI. Extremely fast, sensitive, and relatively low-cost digital sensors (sCMOS sensors) were now available. So were high-quality, wide-angle commercial camera lenses.

Instead of needing a billion-dollar budget to build a custom observatory, the team could build a new kind of instrument from these advanced, off-the-shelf components. The project was funded not by a large government grant, but by a combination of private philanthropy and a successful crowdfunding campaign. This public support demonstrated a strong and shared desire to see this new avenue of SETI explored. The first prototype instrument was installed and tested, paving the way for a global network.

How the LASERSETI Instrument Works

The core of the project is the instrument itself. It’s a self-contained, weather-proof “observatory in a box” that can be deployed to dark-sky sites around the world.

More Camera, Less Telescope

A LASERSETI instrument doesn’t look like a traditional observatory. There’s no large dome or massive, movable telescope. Instead, it’s a relatively small, stationary device. Inside a protective “clamshell” housing that opens at night is a metal plate holding two cameras.

These aren’t your typical cameras. They use sophisticated scientific-grade sensors that are “read out” (their data is checked) many thousands of times per second. This speed is what allows them to catch a nanosecond pulse.

The cameras are equipped with wide-field lenses, similar to high-end photography lenses. This is what gives the instrument its massive field of view. A single instrument, with its two cameras, covers about one-quarter of the visible night sky from its location. The plan is to have a set of these instruments at each site to cover the full 360-degree sky.

The Ultimate False Positive Filter

The biggest challenge in a search like this isn’t sensitivity; it’s certainty. The night sky is full of “false positives.”

• A high-energy cosmic ray from deep space can slam into the camera’s sensor, causing a single pixel to light up in a bright flash.
• A satellite or piece of space debris can glint in the sunlight, creating a flash.
• A high-altitude meteor can burn up, creating a fast streak.
• Even internal electronic “noise” in the detector can create a random bright pixel.

If your system triggers on every one of these, you’ll be buried in false alarms.

LASERSETI’s design brilliantly solves this problem. The secret is the “two-camera” system. Each instrument doesn’t have one camera; it has two identical cameras mounted side-by-side, staring at the exact same patch of sky.

This “coincidence detection” is the filter.

• If a cosmic ray hits the instrument, it will strike one detector or the other, but not both at the exact same pixel at the exact same nanosecond. The system rejects this event.
• If a satellite glint occurs, it’s relatively close to Earth. Because the two cameras are slightly separated (like our two eyes), the satellite will show parallax. It will appear in a slightly different position on the left sensor than on the right sensor. The system sees the mismatch and rejects it.
• If a distant laser pulse from an alien civilization arrives, it’s coming from light-years away. It’s so far away that its light rays are perfectly parallel. It will strike the exact same pixel (relative to the starfield) on bothdetectors at the exact same nanosecond.

This is the “trigger.” The only event that can pass this filter is a light source from “infinity” that flashes faster than any known natural object.

The Data Tsunami

This setup is powerful, but it generates a torrent of data. The cameras are constantly streaming information to an on-site computer. It’s impossible to save all of this data. There isn’t enough hard drive space in the world.

So, the processing has to happen in real-time. Powerful software, aided by machine learning algorithms, sifts through the data stream as it happens. It’s constantly comparing the view from camera one with the view from camera two.

Most of the data – the 99.999…% that is just noise, stars, and satellites – is immediately discarded. The software is programmed to save only the anomalies. When that one-in-a-billion trigger event occurs – a simultaneous, zero-parallax flash – the system saves a “snapshot” of the data from a few seconds before and after the event. This small file is then sent over the internet to the central SETI Institute servers for human scientists to analyze.

In this way, LASERSETI can monitor the entire sky continuously without drowning in its own data. It’s a high-tech net, designed to let all the “fish” (normal data) swim through, catching only the one “dolphin” (the technosignature) it’s looking for.

Deployment and the Global Network

A single LASERSETI instrument, even monitoring a large patch of sky, is not enough. To truly cover the entire celestial sphere, a network is required.

The First Eyes on the Sky

The first two permanent LASERSETI observatories were deployed to demonstrate the technology and begin the search.

1. Robert Ferguson Observatory (RFO): The first site is located at the RFO in Sonoma County, California. This location provided a good, relatively dark sky close to the development team in Silicon Valley, allowing for easy testing and refinement.
2. Haleakalā Observatory: The second, and more advanced, observatory was installed on the island of Hawaii, at the Haleakalā Observatory. This is one of the premier astronomical sites in the world, located above 10,000 feet, where the air is thin, dry, and exceptionally clear. This site provides a pristine view of the night sky, significantly increasing the instrument’s sensitivity.

These first two sites are focused on the Northern Hemisphere. They are the pathfinders for the project, proving that the hardware can operate autonomously and reliably, opening their clamshells at dusk and closing them at dawn, weathering the elements, and successfully hunting for signals.

Why a Global Network is Necessary

The Earth is round, and it spins. An observatory in California can only see the sky above it. To monitor the entire sky, including the rich starfields of the southern celestial hemisphere (like the Galactic Center), instruments must be placed in both hemispheres.

The goal of the LASERSETI project is to build a global network of these observatories. The plan involves placing instruments at sites around the world. Locations in Puerto Rico, the Canary Islands, and Chile (another of the world’s best astronomical locations) have been identified.

A global network does two things:

1. Full-Sky Coverage: With observatories in both the northern and southern hemispheres, no part of the sky is left unwatched.
2. Immediate Confirmation: If the observatory in Hawaii detects a candidate signal, the observatory in Chile or the Canary Islands might be looking at that same patch of sky. If they also see the signal, it provides instant, independent confirmation, dramatically increasing confidence that the signal is real and not some local instrument glitch.

Deployment Hurdles

Building this network is a major undertaking. It requires significant funding to build the dozens of instruments needed. It also involves complex logistics. The project team has to scout for locations that offer not just dark skies and good weather, but also reliable power and a high-speed internet connection to send the trigger data back home.

It involves forging partnerships with universities and observatories in other countries, navigating regulations, and building a system robust enough to be maintained by local staff. This expansion from two sites to a global network is the project’s next major phase.

The Expanding Search for Technosignatures

LASERSETI is not operating in a vacuum. It’s a key part of a much broader, renewed interest in the search for technosignatures – any measurable, observable evidence of technology.

Complements, Not Competition

It’s important to understand that optical SETI is not replacing radio SETI. The two approaches are complementary. They are searching for different kinds of signals based on different assumptions. It’s entirely possible that one civilization might use radio beacons while another uses lasers. By searching for both, we double our chances.

The Breakthrough Listen initiative, for example, is investing $100 million in radio and optical searches, using time on massive telescopes like the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the Parkes Observatory in Australia. These efforts are primarily targeted searches, pointing at nearby stars and galaxies.

LASERSETI’s all-sky survey strategy perfectly complements these targeted searches. While Green Bank is “listening” deeply to one star, LASERSETI is “watching” millions of stars at once, waiting for a transient flash.

Radio vs. Optical: A Tale of Two Searches

The two methods represent different philosophies in the search for life, each with its own logic and challenges.

Beyond Beacons: Artifact SETI

The search for technosignatures is also expanding beyond just communication signals. What if a civilization isn’t trying to contact us at all? We might still be able to find them by looking for their “artifacts” or the large-scale impact they have on their environment.

This is sometimes called “Artifact SETI.”

• Dyson Spheres: One of the most famous ideas is the Dyson sphere, a hypothetical megastructure that an advanced civilization might build around its star to capture its entire energy output. Such a structure would block the star’s visible light but would glow brightly in infrared (heat). Searches for these “waste heat” signatures are another form of optical/infrared SETI.
• Atmospheric Pollution: Just as our industrial activity has filled Earth’s atmosphere with chemicals like chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), an alien industrial society might do the same. Next-generation instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope are capable of studying the atmospheres of exoplanets. Finding industrial pollutants would be a stunning technosignature.
• Artificial Structures: Other ideas include searching for large, artificial structures in orbit or even probes within our own solar system.

LASERSETI fits into this broader context as a search for an intentional beacon, but it’s part of a portfolio of searches that are all “thinking outside the box” of traditional radio SETI.

What If It Finds Something?

This is the most exciting part of the project. What happens if one night, the observatory in Hawaii and the one in Chile both trigger, at the exact same time, on a signal coming from a Kepler star system known to host an Earth-like planet?

From Anomaly to Signal: The Verification Pipeline

A single detection, even a “coincident” one, is not proof. It’s an anomaly. The first step would be rigorous verification.

1. Analyze the Data: The science team would pore over the saved data. Is the signal perfectlymonochromatic? Is the pulse shape really a nanosecond long? Is the parallax exactly zero? They would try every method possible to prove it’s a new natural phenomenon or a previously unknown flaw in their detectors.
2. Alert Other Observatories: The team would immediately contact other astronomers around the world, both radio and optical, and ask them to point their telescopes at the target star. Can Breakthrough Listen hear a radio signal from it? Can the Keck Observatory get a high-resolution spectrum? Can other LASERSETI nodes see the pulse again?
3. Look for Repetition: A one-time flash is intriguing. A repeating flash is a message. The team would monitor the target 24/7, waiting for the signal to appear again. A pattern – a pulse every hour, or a complex series of pulses – would move the signal from “anomaly” to “prime candidate.”

The SETI Post-Detection Protocol

Contrary to movie plots, there isn’t a secret government agency that would classify the discovery. The scientific community has had a plan for this moment for decades. It’s often called the “SETI Post-Detection Protocol.”

It’s not a law, but rather an agreement and a set of best practices developed by the SETI Permanent Committee of the International Academy of Astronautics.

The steps are clear:

1. Verify: The discoverer must confirm the signal is unambiguously artificial. All natural explanations must be exhausted.
2. Announce: The discoverer should inform the wider scientific community first (for example, through the International Astronomical Union) to bring the world’s scientific resources to bear on the signal.
3. Inform the Public: Following scientific confirmation, the discovery should be announced openly and publicly. The information belongs to all of humankind.
4. No Reply: The protocol explicitly states that no reply should be sent on behalf of Earth. Any decision to reply would be a global one, made after international consultation and debate, and would not be the decision of the astronomers who made the discovery.

A detection by LASERSETI would trigger this process, leading to a period of intense, open, and global scientific scrutiny.

The Philosophical Shockwave

If that scrutiny holds up, and the signal is confirmed as artificial, the world would change overnight. The discovery would answer, once and for all, the question “Are we alone?”

The impact would be hard to overstate. It would touch every aspect of human life, from science and religion to philosophy and art. It would prove that life is not unique to Earth, and that technology can arise in other places. It would give us a single point of data in the Drake Equation, transforming it from a guess into a tool.

Even if the signal is never decoded, the simple knowledge that another intelligence exists in the cosmos would reframe our perspective of ourselves and our place in the universe.

Summary

LASERSETI is a new and elegant answer to an old question. It leverages modern, off-the-shelf technology to conduct a search that was impossible just a decade ago. It moves SETI away from the “soda straw” method of listening to one star at a time and embraces a “wide-net” strategy of watching the entire sky.

Its clever dual-camera design is a powerful filter against the noise of the cosmos, built to find that one specific, needle-in-a-haystack signal: a nanosecond flash of a laser beacon. By building a global network, the project will provide the first-ever, continuous, all-sky monitoring of the heavens in optical light.

Like all SETI projects, LASERSETI is a patient, persistent search. It may find nothing. The Great Silence may continue, teaching us that, perhaps, we are indeed a rare and special phenomenon. Or, one night, an instrument on a dark mountaintop may capture a billionth-of-a-second flash, a flicker of light from across the interstellar ocean, and in that instant, our world and our future will be changed forever.