Although the civilizations that deployed these lurkers may well be dead, the lurkers themselves could still be active enough to communicate with us. For example, if an alien civilization noted that artifacts were likely a more cost-effective contact strategy than broadcasts, then SETA would prove more successful than conventional SETI.
However, if an alien civilization was much like ours in that it was only capable of spaceflight at interplanetary speeds, then it might only ever build beacons instead of interstellar probes, and conventional SETI would prove more successful than SETA. Extraterrestrial civilizations that passed near the sun might have been especially interested in launching probes at the solar system, Benford said. He noted that about two stars come within one light-year of the solar system per million years, and about one star comes within 10 light-years every 5, years.
The most recent close encounter the solar system had was with Scholz's Star, which came within 0. Related: 10 exoplanets that could host alien life. Benford suggested first analyzing lunar images for signs of extraterrestrial probes. He noted that NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has taken about 2 million photos of the moon since "with resolution down to about a foot 0.
We need to use AI [artificial intelligence] software to look for structures, for signs of artificiality, which could benefit sciences on Earth, such as archaeology.
And that's an ancient, ancient question that humans have asked for a long time… My experience was to realize that perhaps our science is wrong at answering these questions and perhaps our religious cosmologies are archaic and flawed. And given that now we are an extraterrestrial civilization ourselves, we need to re-ask these questions, and do a lot more work to find the answers.
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All rights reserved. Although exciting and path breaking in their own right, these visions were all formulated well before the emergence of the frontier of astrobiology associated with the search for extraterrestrial life. Can the moon provide clues for extraterrestrial life? A new paper I wrote with Manasvi Lingam answers this question in the affirmative. The lack of a lunar atmosphere guarantees that these messengers would reach the lunar surface without burning up.
In addition, the geological inactivity of the moon implies that the record deposited on its surface will be preserved and not mixed with the deep lunar interior. Serving as a natural mailbox, the lunar surface collected all impacting objects during the past few billions of years.
But the solar system also intercepts objects from interstellar space, ranging from dust particles to free-floating planets and stars. And most recently, yet another interstellar visitor may have been identified. Given the search volume and duration of the surveys that made these detections, it is now possible, for the first time, to calibrate the flux of interstellar objects assuming they enter the solar system on random trajectories. The buildup of interstellar matter can also be observed in real time; another new paper with my undergraduate student, Amir Siraj, showed that a two-meter telescope on a satellite in orbit around the moon can observe interstellar impactors as they crash.
In case some interstellar impactors carry the building blocks of extraterrestrial life, one could extract these biomarkers by analyzing lunar surface samples. Moon rocks delivered to Earth by the Apollo mission were likely contaminated by terrestrial life and are not a viable alternative to a dedicated experimental base on the moon. Identifying biomarkers from debris of material that originated in the habitable zone around other stars would inform us about the nature of extraterrestrial life.
The fundamental question is whether distant life resembles the biochemical structures we find on Earth. Similarities might imply that there exists a unique chemical path for life everywhere or that life was transferred between systems. Either way, a lunar study shortcuts the need to send spacecraft on extremely long missions to visit other star systems. Getting similar information from a trip to the nearest star system—Alpha Centauri A, B or C—would take nearly nine years round-trip, even if the spacecraft were to travel at the maximum speed allowed in nature, the speed of light; the first half of this period is required for reaching the target and the second half for the information to get back to us.
With chemical rockets, this journey would take about , years, on the order of the time that elapsed since the first modern humans began migrating out of Africa.
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