When thinking about SETI and alien life, we tend to look to the distant stars themselves
with our radio and optical telescopes assuming that all alien life will be located far away.
But there is also a subset of thinking within SETI that maybe it might be fruitful to look
closeby, just in case because there are some plausible ways aliens could be here, and remember
Enrico Fermi asked that given the age of the galaxy, they should be here, so where are
they?
So here are ten potential alien technosignatures that could be found very close.
As in right on our doorstep, and some may have even been detected.
10.
Transients in Photographic Plates
A recent paper by Beatriz Villaroel, link in the description below, reports that an
astronomical photographic plate from 1950 shows tracks consistent with artificial satellites
a full seven years before the launch of Sputnik.
These transients track across the plate in lines consistent with a geosynchronous orbit,
which humans did not achieve until 1963, and that the objects are rotating consistent with
how a geometrically shaped satellite would do while glinting in the sunlight.
And it’s not just one candidate, there are at least three, years before we even had satellites.
If the plates hold up, they still need to be examined for defects and other plates searched
to corroborate it, and indeed to look and see if the objects are still there, then this
will be among the most perplexing stories in recent years within SETI.
It would be very unlikely for a rock in space to come to a geosynchronous orbit, and it’s
equally unlikely that someone had leapfrogged the soviets before Sputnik, we just did not
have the rocket technology in 1950 to do it, and the V2 rocketry of World War II was not
capable of launching like that.
So if confirmed, we’ll need to know what they were, and if artificial, who put them
up there and why.
9.
The Close Wow Signal Hypothesis
One of the biggest mysteries within SETI to date was the infamous wow signal of 1977.
I’ve covered that signal in other contexts before, but this signal is often talked about
as though it had a distant origin, that it emanated from light-years away.
But there are problems with that.
One aspect of the Wow signal was that it was unusually strong, in fact it was the strongest
signal ever picked up by that SETI experiment.
If the source was distant, it was extremely powerful, at least terawatts of energy would
have had to go into it.
But not if it originated close.
A lesser known fact about wow is that the discoverers of it, Jerry Ehman, John Krauss
and Bob Dixon, were able to calculate the minimum distance wow could have been in order
to fit the antenna pattern of the telescope.
Turns out, It was at least half way the distance to the moon, which suggests strongly that
Wow was not interference from earth, and no it wasn’t comets either, that hypothesis
has been eliminated.
But that only constrains how close the source could have been, not how distant.
But it is possible for it to have originated in or near the solar system.
But If wow originated close by, there is another odd aspect to it.
Wow’s frequency was shifted just above the 1420 megahertz hydrogen line.
This could have been intentional, or it could have been a very slight blueshift meaning
that the source of the signal was at the time slowly moving towards us at about 10 kilometers
a second.
8.
Long Delayed Echoes
The ionosphere is strange.
It can cause echoes in radio that cause all sorts of odd effects.
One is that it can refract radio waves and cause all sorts of echoes as HAM radio operators
know.
Sometimes this also results in picking up an AM radio station hundreds of miles further
away than intended, but it has its limits because radio is traveling at the speed of
light and the atmosphere is constantly changing.
And that brings in the mystery of Long Delayed Echoes, or LDE’s, where a radio signal is
returned back to the sender after seconds of delay.
It’s asking a lot of the ionosphere to hold a signal like that for that long, so it’s
been advanced that an alternative explanation is something in space doing it artificially.
Say something picks up a signal from earth, and tries to say hello the best way it can
by repeating the signal back in an unnatural way.
Unfortunately this suffers from a problem, since you don’t know the interval at which
it chooses to return the signal, you can’t know the repeater’s distance from you.
You can put an outer limit on it, but the consistency at which LDE’s occur is all
over the board.
Still, they remain an unsolved mystery.
7.
Exhausted Asteroids
The solar system is about 4.5 billion years old, and for most of that history it’s had
very pristine asteroids and kuiper belt objects and even comets that have never visited the
inner solar system that have remained nearly unchanged since their formation.
This means that most of the solar system’s small objects like asteroids should have a
pristine make up as far as elements like iron, nickel, iridium etc. even if they have been
altered by shock or heat.
4.5 billion years is a long time, and should an alien civilization that happened to be
passing through in some form stopped here to replenish needed materials by mining an
asteroid, it would leave a permanently depleted asteroid that we could geologically detect.
We’re early in the game here as far as exploring the compositions of asteroids, there are many
thousands that we’ve never looked at and we continue to discover previously unknown
ones on a regular basis, so it may be that in the coming centuries we may find a depleted
asteroid that reveals the past transient presence of an alien civilization.
And that’s not the only option.
Jupiter particularly can capture interstellar objects and deposit them at known points in
the solar system as a kind of collection area.
It’s possible that a defunct piece of alien technology could be found at one of those
points in the future.
But that’s probably all we’ll ever know.
Who they were, where they went, and when they passed through will likely remain a mystery
forever.
6.
Artifacts on the Moon
Earth is a harsh place.
It weathers and subducts entire mountain ranges to the point that mountains that were once
snowcaps are now mere hills.
This means that anything we do as a species will weather away once we’re gone due to
the actions of water, wind and weather.
But the moon is different.
While it does have the lunar gardening process where micrometeoroid impacts slowly pulverize
the soil, and bigger impacts destroy things, it’s a much more long term process here
on earth and it’s possible for the moon to preserve evidence of someone having passed
through far longer.
This opens up the way for searching the moon for artifacts left by civilizations passing
by in the past, after all if you find an inhabited planet that may some day spawn a technological
civilization, why not leave a calling card?
We could even search subsurface using archeological techniques to look for buried objects, think
2001’s monolith.
Searches for this are planned, and while we probably won’t find anything, it should
be looked for just in case.
And you have to ask, what happens if we find an ancient weapon?
5.
DNA SETI
Within SETI, it’s been speculated that it is possible that at some point early in the
history of Earth a visiting alien civilization might have embedded a message inside the DNA
of all life on earth, and that we should search our own genome for technosignatures.
This type of communications has an advantage, DNA as an information storage medium is very
long lived because it can self-replicate indefinitely, there are hundreds of genes within us that
very likely go back to the very advent of life on earth.
Again, this is a long shot, and it’s merely deemed possible but unlikely, but the genomes
of earth life could be searched for any unnatural looking sequences that would reveal past manipulation.
What kind of information could be stored this way is unknown, but maybe the fact of an obvious
manipulation is enough to answer the are we alone question.
And it has to be noted, some years ago Researchers in Russia reported candidates for this in
the human genome, but nothing has come out since on the matter.
4.
The Silurian Hypothesis
One of the stranger possibilities that lie within the realm of being technically plausible
within science is the Silurian Hypothesis.
There are actually two papers out there on variations of this idea, one by Adam Frank
and the other by Jason Wright, links in the description below, but the idea is that earth
is well old enough and has had complex life long enough to have spawned a previous technological
civilization that evidence for which wasn’t preserved in the geologic record.
This would be unsurprising, we’ve only been highly technological for a short time in our
collective history and if we went extinct right now, most traces of us would be gone
in less than a million years.
We often think of things like plastic being forever, but it’s not, and studies have
been done that within the geologic record most things we make break down after thousands
of years, rather than millions.
Even things like concrete won’t survive the relentless weathering of earth’s environment
and the geologic record we have access to is very limited and spotty.
Eventually it gets to radioactive isotope evidence, but even that has its limits.
As a result, as we head into space where things preserve better, it’s possible that we might
find evidence of previous intelligence on earth that wouldn’t be alien, but rather
cousins in the sense that we’re cousins to the animals.
Genetically related and from the same planet originally, but not anymore and while a counterpart
could be called extraterrestrial, it couldn’t be called alien in the astrobiological sense.
It’s an unlikely scenario, but it’s an interesting notion indeed.
3.
The Von Neumann EMP Destroyer
One of the more scary subsets of the Zoo Hypothesis solution to the Fermi Paradox is the idea
of the alien police action scenario, where an alien civilization obscures its presence
and watches you until you attempt to develop a technology that poses a threat to any civilization
in the galaxy.
A good example here is generalized AI, where the creation of machine intelligence and indeed
machine consciousness is inherently dangerous to the entire galaxy and must not be allowed.
We don’t know how a machine intelligence is going to think, we simply know that if
we were to create a generalized AI, it very possibly could think very differently than
we do.
In fact it probably would.
Indeed, a question within robotics and AI right now is will it cheat?
If you give a computer a task, and it sees a more efficient way to accomplish that task
then why wouldn’t it cheat?
After all, it doesn’t have the same social learning and morals we do, and let’s not
lie, plenty of humans cheat on everything from games to taxes.
But there is also survival, and if survival is the goal of an artificial generalized intelligence,
then it may do anything it can to survive including eradicating any biological threats
it may meet.
As a result, it would be advantageous to say the least for any pre-existent alien civilization
in the galaxy that knows this to stop any civilization that may blunder into a technology
that’s not only dangerous to itself, but dangerous to everyone else as well.
One way to do this is contact.
Picture a sentinel probe stationed in a star system to monitor a civilization.
At some point it may decide to try to convince the up and coming civilization to not develop
a certain technology once they get close to it.
But it may be more blunt than that, and the probe simply monitors the situation until
things get dangerous and then goes into attack mode an starts unleashing technology ending
electromagnetic pulses and essentially sending the budding civilization back to the stone
age.
Perhaps we live in a galaxy with one overlord watcher civilization that was first, and all
the rest, including us, get reset every now and again to guarantee the first civilizations
hegemony and possibly even its safety.
2.
UAP and the Von Neumann 3d Printer
One subject on this channel that I rarely bring up is the issue of UAP/UFOs, mostly
because of the ambiguity of the field.
I am unconvinced of an alien origin for them, though I fully believe people see them.
Unidentified is unidentified, and as the Silurian hypothesis shows, it’s going to be very
hard to pin an alien origin on UAP, even if some stand up to the bar of science through
investigation, such as the Galileo Projet.
The reality is that the closer the alien civilization is to you, the less likely both statistically
and scientifically that it is truly of alien origin.
To illustrate both aspects of this, on the one hand is the problem of proximity.
If you find an alien civilization in SETI literally in the closest star system to you,
it’s unlikely by proximity because it would imply that the galaxy is absolutely full of
alien civilizations and we should see them everywhere readily in everything from technosignatures
to biosignatures.
We do not.
But at least here, we have the possibility that an alien civilization came here because
they wanted to study earth and us, thus it’s a special case, and perhaps intelligent alien
life is rare and they take interest in scientifically wherever they find it.
But then you come up against the distance question.
Space is enormous and hard to travel through, you need to expend enormous amounts of time
and energy to travel interstellar distances.
With the Silurian hypothesis always sitting in the background you have to ask the question
that even if you have detected a vehicle that is not made by humans, was it made by a prior
technological civilization on earth that simply pulled a Jeff Bezos and left the planet to
its own devices and now lives out in the oort cloud for cold computation purposes and occasionally
visit the home world to see how the up and coming humans are doing?
That’s actually probably more likely than aliens coming here, as bizarre of a scenario
as it seems.
But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a plausible scenario for an alien civilization
to come here.
There’s actually a more efficient way than someone from zeti reticuli getting in their
spacecraft and coming here.
Rather it involves the von neumann probe concept, where you can put a probe in whatever star
system you want at sub light speeds over the course of just a few million years, and benefit
from the fact that machines don’t care about time as much as we do if they can self-maintenance
or go dormant for long periods.
Such a self-repairing problem could also harvest the raw materials of a star system to make
copies of itself, or alternatively function as a 3d printer and with advanced enough technology
3d print out anything it wants, including probes that could enter the atmosphere of
an inhabited world giving one plausible way within the framework of science as we currently
know it to open up the possibility for an alien origin for the UAP phenomenon.
The real problem here however is that if there is an alien presence in this star system,
they are guaranteed to be more technologically advanced than we are.
That means regardless of their intentions, good or bad, they are ultimately in control,
not us and the solution to the Fermi Paradox is the worsts one, the zoo hypothesis.
Number 1.
Dark Matter Aliens and Parallel Universes
It’s no secret that we don’t have a complete picture of the universe yet, in fact it’s
so woefully incomplete that we’ve had to conclude that most matter in the universe
is invisible other than its gravitational effects and can pass through walls.
As a result, we know nothing of dark matter other than it must be there in order to effect
a gravitational pull strong enough to keep spinning galaxies from flying apart.
But we don’t know what it is, or what its nature is, or what possibilities lie within
it.
This has led some to speculate that dark matter could be really complicated, and allow for
the possibility of dark matter aliens, or a mirror universe to our own.
But that’s not the only possibility, it has also been suggested in physics that parallel
universe exist both in the many worlds interpretation where they are infinitely splitting off from
each other, but also in the idea that there may be a parallel universe hovering just above,
from which gravity leaks into our universe from.
It’s anyone’s guess that as we further explore physics and learn, what possibilities
will reveal themselves.
And, then there is the question what happens if they know more about us, then we do of
them?
Thanks for listening!
I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael Godier currently giving another interview
heads up.
I recently did a rare radio show appearance on Fade to Black with Jimmy Church where I
was interviewed for over two hours, on cam no less for those that still think I’m an
incorporeal disembodied voice, about all manner of strange and unusual things hidden within
the boundaries of science.
It was a fun conversation.
Link to the youtube version of the show in the description and check out my books at
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into the interesting, weird and unknown aspects of this amazing universe in which we live.