NASA’s quest for extraterrestrial life now includes technosignatures, evidence of advanced civilizations on distant exoplanets. Through AI, new research methods, and a broadened focus, scientists remain hopeful in discovering life beyond Earth. Our first confirmed proof of life beyond Earth might
Given how “easy” it is for a civilization to spread throughout a galaxy on a short cosmic timescale, I personally think there are two particularly fertile approaches to searching for technosignatures.
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Search our own solar system for Bracewell probes or other signs of very ancient engineering on the long-lived asteroid or lunar surfaces in our own solar system. I consider this unlikely since I don’t see why an interstellar civilization that had been present in our galaxy would ever “go away”, but if it had existed then they’d have likely left some sort of identifiable junk lying around.
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Surveys of distant galaxies and galactic clusters for Kardashev-III technosignatures. Since as I suggest above I see no reason for an interstellar civilization to “go away” that means they’ll eventually end up heavily engineering their entire galaxy and others nearby.
Personally I don’t think either of these approaches will actually bear fruit, some form of “rare intelligence” seems the most likely solution to the Fermi Paradox to me. But it wouldn’t be science if we were sure of the outcome.
Personally I don’t think either of these approaches will actually bear fruit
Yeah, I ere on the side of pessimism on us ever contacting another intelligent species. It’s fun to still try it, but the math is staggeringly against us. Even with trying to detect radio waves from another solar system, radio waves have their limits on how far away they can be detected before the cosmic background covers them up. The odds of us picking up on radio waves from another planet are… not good.
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