What about the Optical Spectrum?
To be frank, the early focus, plus Project Cyclops (artist's concept above), carried so much eminence that the microwave searchers dominated from the beginning and continue to today. Thus, indirect techniques prevailed for the detection of extrasolar planets, while the capability of distinguishing signals from longer distances solidified the case.
There are two types of optical SETI researchers: those employing incoherent photon counting and others utilizing coherent (like a laser light) heterodyne detection. I was advocating the latter as an exoplanet detection concept more than twenty years before the optical approach for exosignals began to be accepted by atrophysicists in 1998. However, the second energy crisis arrived in 1979 and I turned my efforts toward crusades like Green Enertopia and the Blue Revolution. A third of a century went by and I have finally returned. I missed the 2001 SETI gathering in San Jose where Charles Townes presented a paper entitled, “Reflections on Forty Years of Optical SETI—Looking Forward and Looking Backward,” but look forward to participating in the next one.
At that California conference, Stuart Kingsley talked on “Optical SETI Observatories in the New Millennium: A Review.” Kingsley valiantly pursued the subject with his Visible Optical SETI Observatory associated with Ohio State University at Columbus. He was mostly self-funded and in 2007, after 26 years of general futility, moved to Bournemouth, England. His attitude is that the scientific community went in the wrong direction because of mistaken assumptions.
In any case, over the next few decades, I would think that the optical spectrum will gain in respect, especially in the search for exoplanets. The next section will provide some details to this historical sketch. If it can be shown that coherent signals can be sent efficiently over reasonable distances, then even the detection of actual optical extraterrestrial intelligence signals might gain in prominence, too. Hmm…a career reborn?
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