The EXPERT, March 2026, Issue 2

---

It’s late. The light sinks into blue on this Friday afternoon, rain runs down the window, and the shadow of my pencil is cast upon my notebook. As I wait for Professor Michael Garrett to arrive I wonder how many of us once lay awake as children, baffled by how big the universe really is?

Professor Michael Garrett is an authority in the field of extraterrestrial life, one look at his online profile will tell you that. Inaugural Sir Bernard Lovell Chair for Astrophysics at Manchester, Former Director of Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, and active in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) – his credentials speak for themselves. Yet, when he arrives, what strikes me is just how down to earth he is, forgive the pun. He sips ‘milky coffee’ and is retreating from the Manchester rain in a cosy jumper. He has a warm Glaswegian accent. Within five minutes we’re talking about Star Trek.

“I remember my Dad saying, ‘There’s a show on tonight, you’ll like’ and I did. How did he know that?” He laughs.

I don’t realise it yet, but the symbiotic relationship between art and science would become a recurring theme throughout our conversation today. When asked if there is a particular moment that sparked his area of research, he tells me that it all traces back to being a youngster, specifically: “Captain Kirk going around the galaxies, finding sort-of intelligent species different from us,” he says, “And, a thin book I came to read by Carl Sagan, Other Worlds.”

For most of his career, Garrett has been an astrophysicist in the traditional sense. But over the past decade, a certain inescapable question brought him back to that childhood fascination: are we alone in the universe?

“Somehow or other.” he grins, “I’ve found a place I can meaningfully contribute to a question that doesn’t just appeal to scientists but to everyone.”

In the last ten years, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence has undergone a quiet revolution. Garrett’s work is focused on technosignatures – potential indicators of advanced technology embedded in astronomical data: anomalies or as he puts it “weird things”, in radio waves, optical signals, infrared, and X-rays.

“It’s telescopes and the data that comes from those telescopes which hold the ability to find within their data-sets telltale signs of intelligence. Of a technical civilization.”

At Manchester, his current programme operates at the edge of that search, working with PhD researchers and scientists who aren’t just asking what alien life might look like, but how it might behave. What would it build? How would it communicate? What footprints would it leave behind?

Broadly, research on the search for extraterrestrial life can be split into two halves: biosignatures and technosignatures. Biosignatures focus on what can be produced by living biologies – especially gases like oxygen or methane appearing in planetary atmospheres where they shouldn’t naturally persist. By contrast, technosignatures search for artificial imprints found on astronomical data.

For Garrett, the explosion of AI could transform how they approach astronomical data and accelerate discovery.

In the past two years, Garrett has written extensively on how AI will be revolutionary for this work. He believes the rate of technological evolution is only going to speed up: “AI will be a fantastic tool when it comes to understanding our universe,” he says, “Technology will rapidly change in the next 50 years. What we have now restricts us to only being able to detect civilisations like ourselves. But things are about to take off…”

This brings us to a topic scrawled down and underlined a few times in my notes. The much-discussed Fermi-Paradox: if intelligent life is statistically likely, where is everyone?

Garrett’s answer is a humbling, hopeful one. He suggests the problem may not be absence at all, but asymmetry.

“Our tech is 200 years old on this planet, on other planets there may be intelligent life that is thousands, or tens-of-thousands, maybe even millions of years old. It would be pretty arrogant of us to think that with our stone age technology we could detect something 10,000 years more advanced.”

He smiles as he explains this, sipping his drink. This is his favourite theory. Life is out there, just not within our reach, yet.

Yet technological acceleration brings its own complications, and challenges. In an era of convincing-enough deepfakes and viral misinformation, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for the public to extrapolate the science from the fiction. Orson Welles’ 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast comes to mind – the mock live news of an alien invasion in New Jersey causing mind-melting, widespread panic with the North American public. Today, it’s tempting to question if or how we’ll be able to trust news of extraterrestrial life if it emerges.

“Checking your sources has never been more important,” Garrett’s first piece of advice.

“But, universities are repositories for truth.” He expands, “So, if people are looking for the facts, they should be looking at what universities are doing.”

Institutions, he suggests, will play a critical role in maintaining credibility, should such a discovery come about.

Part of that responsibility lies in policy. Garrett has recently been involved in updating the SETI “No Reply Consensus”, a framework outlining what should happen if intelligent life is detected. Interestingly, the decision to respond would not rest with scientists alone.

“Look, if there is intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy, that’s something of interest to all the peoples of the world.”

The process would involve the UN, the press, and the public. Ultimately, the goal is that this decision would not belong to one institution or country, but to humanity.  This sense of community is an undercurrent across Garrett’s work, and indeed the academic spaces he occupies.

That one central question “are we alone in the universe?” connects all of us. He tells me that it’s not just scientists he’s interested in collaborating with. Not just astrophysicists and biologists working in this space, but lawyers, anthropologists and theologists; artists brought in to interpret previously unknown and freshly discovered patterns in radio waves.

“In the end, we’re all thinking the same things.” He pauses. “What do these civilisations look like? How do they speak? How do they communicate? Do they have children? Religion? Do they understand the concepts of art, poetry, literature, of love?”

The late afternoon light has thinned into evening, and as it’s time to wrap up. Garrett takes a moment to thank me for the questions, but adds:

“No one can truly be an expert on this topic,” he reflects. “Because no one can answer that one question, yet.”

And for now, the mystery remains.

---