The search for alien signals is like a photo hunt for a firefly in a forest at night. A single shot blurs the flash, but many fast frames stacked together reveal the tiny light. For decades, astronomers tuned into the radio waves of stars (Karl Jansky) and caught laser pulses from them (Charles Townes). Now the idea is different: search not near stars, but in the void — interstellar probes, drifting in the interstellar medium and flashing for microseconds. Ordinary telescopes, which collect light for whole seconds, lose these signals in the noise. We need 'short-exposure photography': cameras shoot millions of frames a second, and machine learning stacks them, syncing in time — that's how you tease a faint outline out of the dark. Simulations and brightness measurements show: a one-meter telescope can spot a 100-megawatt beam from 65 light-years away — a region with 3000 stars that have planets. A similar trick once revealed pulsars. Right now, we may be surrounded by such flashes but miss them because our cameras are too sluggish. The method not only holds the promise of contact, but also helps study fleeting cosmic explosions and refines how often technological civilizations emerge.