8 Crazy Futuristic Science Experiments Happening Right Now

5. Laser Cloaking To Hide Us From Aliens

Stephen Hawking and many others, has warned us in the past that trying to reach out to our alien neighbours might be a very bad idea indeed. With this in mind, astronomers at Columbia University in New York are working on an interstellar cloaking device for the Earth, should we ever want to hide our existence from less-than-friendly extraterrestrials.

And it uses lasers.

In our search for other planets around other stars, we use a technique called the transit detection method. This involves looking for a dip in a star's brightness as the planet passes in front of it. The idea behind the cloaking device is that we could mask our own planet's transit signal by cancelling it out using a laser, with the beam directed at the star where the alines might live.

Alternatively, we could also use the lasers to modify the light broadcast during transit to make it more obviously artificial. This would be a big sign to any watching extraterrestrials that there is intelligent life down here. We could even use it to send encoded messages.

The jury is still out on whether it would be a good idea to announce our presence to the universe but, without a cloaking device, we might not have a choice.