From UFO crash sites on other planets and aliens “lurking” in asteroids to a permanent radio telescope on the far side of the moon, a new NASA-funded study on the search for intelligent extraterrestrial life (SETI) details how future NASA missions could purposefully search for “technosignatures.”getty From UFO crash sites on other planets and aliens “lurking” in asteroids to a permanent radio telescope on the far side of the moon, a new NASA-funded study on the search for intelligent extraterrestrial life (SETI) details how future NASA missions could purposefully search for “technosignatures” of advanced alien civilizations.
Described as evidence of technology use or industrial activity elsewhere in the Universe, the search for technosignatures has barely begun but could reveal something surprising without much additional expense, the study says.
After virtually ceasing its search for technosignatures in 1993 following pressure from politicians, NASA became increasingly involved in SETI.
Published in the specialist journal Acta Astronautica, the study includes a list of what NASA missions could detect as “observational evidence of extraterrestrial life” beyond Earth.
Perhaps most intriguingly, the paper suggests that interstellar probes may have been sent into the Solar System long ago, perhaps during our Sun’s last close encounter with other stars.
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The closest star to the Sun right now, Proxima Centauri, is more than 4.2 light-years away, but roughly every 100,000 years a star comes within nearly a light-year of the Sun. So there have been “tens of thousands” of opportunities for technologies similar to ours to have launched probes into our Solar System, according to the paper. “Such artifacts could have been captured by Solar System bodies in stable orbits or could even have crashed into planets, asteroids, or moons,” the paper says. “Bodies with ancient surfaces, such as those of the Moon or Mars, could still exhibit evidence of such collisions.”
The Moon, Mars, Mercury or Ceres may contain evidence of impacts or existing artifacts that may … [+] have been preserved for millions or billions of years.getty The paper’s nine suggestions for technosignature-hunting missions include:
Mission 1: Search for crash sites on the Moon, Mars, Mercury, or Ceres The surfaces of these places are ancient and unchanging.
Evidence of impacts or existing artifacts may be preserved for millions or billions of years — so we must scan the Moon and Mars in ultra-high resolution. Mission 2:
search for pollution using Earth as a model As recently published for NASA by the same authors, JWST could find CFC gases — evidence of civilization — around exoplanets if they were 10 times more common than on Earth. It could also find nitrogen dioxide (NO2), produced as a byproduct of combustion or nuclear technology.
