I feel that it is quite appropriate for me to review this paper by David Kipping two days after we conducted an observation of 12 transiting Kepler planets from Green Bank Telescope in association with Breakthrough Listen, based on the principle outlined in this paper.
The paper talks about using lasers to cloak the presence of a planet during its transit. However, in this blog I shall not talk about a civilization trying to mask its presence but its attempts to broadcast itself. The paper proposes the principle of a temporal Schelling point in our search for ETI. The question often arises of the best time to search. Since there is no real special time, this paper suggests that the transit of an exoplanet around its host star could be one. If there is a beacon on the night side of the planet, then it would sweep out an arc as the planet revolves around its star. This beacon would be visible from our line of sight when the planet transits the star, if it is directly aimed at its sub – stellar point. This beacon if broadcast continuously would be visible to observers periodically with every transit. Doing this during a transit is an interesting proposition since transits allow for us to also measure the atmospheric composition of planets using spectroscopy. Further, in the near future we should be able to map the longitudinal heat profile as well as atmospheric composition of planets using phase curve spectroscopy. This would provide for definite clues of bio-signatures.
However, the beacon might not necessarily be on a planet which is inhabited by the ETI. The beacon can be on the closest planet, since that would have the highest probability for transiting in a randomly oriented system.
I think this paper is important in acknowledging the special place transits occupy in the optical astronomy, and subsequently extending it to SETI. Its ideas about a civilization using this phenomenon to hide its presence or beam out and advertise itself are novel, and can be one of the anomalies being considered in Wright et al. 2015 (GHat 4).