IAU Symposium - IAUS 404 "Advancing the Search for Technosignatures"

2 - 6 March 2026, online

📃 View the IAUS 404 post meeting report
💫 Read the IAUS 404 meeting report article in Nature Astronomy
▶️ Watch the Recorded Talks and Video Posters
🌐 Visit the IAUS 404 website

The search for extraterrestrial life involves an effort to understand a broad range of plausible biosignatures that could arise in extraterrestrial environments. Technology is one possible consequence of planetary-scale life, which could generate “technosignatures” that could be abundant, long-lived, highly detectable, and unambiguous compared to other biosignatures.

This online symposium seeks to advance the search for technosignatures by featuring contributions on theoretical, instrumental, observational, or data analysis ideas for characterizing and detecting technosignatures. Emphasis will be placed on methods that are relevant to current and future exoplanet observations with facilities such as space- or ground-based telescopes, ongoing solar system exploration missions, and any other analyses of data from existing Earth or space observations. The goal of this symposium is to foster discussion on ways to advance the search for technosignatures by leveraging existing missions and data archives.

Planetary Perspectives

For each of the IAUS 404 videos, the meeting organizers have published posts in Planetary Perspectives:

• IAUS404: Advancing the Search for Technosignatures
• Astrobiology and Technosignature Research with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory
• Blink and You'll Miss It: Why Advanced Aliens May Already Be Invisible to Us
• Could Alien Megastructure Starshades Serve as Signs of Technological Alien Civilizations?
• Crowdsourcing the Cosmos: How Citizen Scientists Are Helping Train AI to Find E.T.
• Grading Galactic Beacons: Could Alien Civilizations Signal Us Through Transit Patterns?
• Hide and Seek Across the Light-Years
• Roll for First Contact: The SETI LARP that's Rehearsing Future Alien Signal Detections
• Stellar Sources that Could Interfere with Detection of Technosignatures
• Still Searching for the Source: New Science on the 1977 Wow! Signal
• Technosignatures Around White Dwarfs, Massive Stars, and Stellar Bycatch
• The Search, the Silence, and the Stories
• The Alien Pollution That Could Prove We're Not Alone
• What Do Chimps See in a Message from Space?
• What If They're Already Here? The Case for Searching Our Own Solar System for Alien Technologies

Contact

Jacob Haqq-Misra 

Coordinating Division

Division F Planetary Systems and Astrobiology

Scientific Organizing Committee

• Jacob Haqq-Misra (Blue Marble Space Institute of Science, USA)
• Ravi Kopparapu (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, USA)
• Beatriz Villarroel (Nordic Institute of Theoretical Physics, Sweden)
• Martin Dominik (University of St Andrews, UK)
• George Profitiliotis (Blue Marble Space Institute of Science, Netherlands)
• Svetlana Berdyugina (Istituto ricerche solari Aldo e Cele Daccò, Italy)

Online Organizing Committee

• Graham Lau (Blue Marble Space Institute of Science, USA)
• Jacob Haqq-Misra (Blue Marble Space Institute of Science, USA)
• Kelly Dobitz (Blue Marble Space Institute of Science, UK)
• Sibsankar Palit (Blue Marble Space Institute of Science, India)
• CJ Baal (Blue Marble Space Institute of Science, USA)