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SETI To Scour the Moon For Alien Footprints?

Posted by Soulskill on from the just-an-old-hierarchy-monitor-station-and-some-robots dept.

astroengine writes "Although we have an entire universe to seek out the proverbial alien needle in a haystack, perhaps looking in our own backyard would be a good place to start. That's the conclusions reached by Paul Davies and Robert Wagner of Arizona State University, anyway. The pair have published a paper in the journal Acta Astronautica detailing how SETI could carry out a low-cost crowdsourcing program (a la SETI@Home) to scour the lunar surface for alien artifacts, thereby gaining clues on whether intelligent aliens are out there and whether they've paid the solar system a visit in the moon's recent history."

4 of 167 comments (clear)

  1. Oh For Fuck's Sake by hondo77 · · Score: 4, Insightful
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    I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
  2. Re:Our own backyard? by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If you wanted to leave a lasting indication of your existence, the moon would be a good place for it. It's unusual in our solar system (the only large moon around a rocky planet). If they visited in the last few billion years, then it would have been in orbit around a planet with life. It also lacks the surface erosion that you get on Earth (no water freezing and melting, no atmospheric effects), so an artefact left there would last for a long time. The stuff the Apollo crews left there is still in good condition - imagine what state it would be in if it were left almost anywhere on Earth (with the possible exception of Antarctica) for the same length of time...

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    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  3. Re:first by MichaelSmith · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Oceans destroy artifacts on the scale of years. One year in the Atlantic is worth a billion years on the moon.

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    http://michaelsmith.id.au
  4. Re:first by viperidaenz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    24 people have been to the moon, 2 to the bottom of the ocean. There are currently satellites orbiting the moon, there is nothing man made swimming around the bottom of the ocean right now. The first unmanned vehicle to go down there was in 1995, the last in 2009.

    You can communicate with the moon in less than 2 seconds using radio waves. It takes 7 seconds for sonar to reach the bottom of the ocean.

    There's apparently a $10,000,000 prize if you can get there twice