ALBUFEIRA

When I was under the velvet black skies of western Texas a few months ago I had a magnificent view of the star-studded bulge of our galaxy, in the direction of the summer constellation Sagittarius.

How many advanced civilizations might be in this hub of the Milky Way? I pondered. After all, this is the direction where the mysterious "WOW" radio signal that was detected three decades ago came from.

The problem is that we are embedded in a thick forest of stars, and identifying the location of an extraterrestrial civilization -- one that's attempting to contact us -- is the proverbial needle-in-haystack search as the SETI scientists always say.

Therefore, it would make sense to go looking at a neighboring "forest," or rather nearby galaxy, for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope is conducting a multi-year survey across a swath of the neighboring Andromeda galaxy (M31). The images are filled with so many resolved stars that they resemble at grains of sand on a beach. This could make an excellent citizen science project, to scour the Andromeda fields for anomalous-looking regions.

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(discovery.com)