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SETI To Scour the Moon For Alien Footprints?
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."
There's apparently a $10,000,000 prize if you can get there twice
To the bottom of the ocean? Doubtful, and citation needed. If some guys in 1960 can build a craft that takes actual humans down to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, and go down there successfully, it would be pretty trivial for someone to do the same thing now twice in a row.
As for nothing swimming around down there, how do you know? There's lots of private companies that operate ROVs for various reasons, such as treasure hunting. They don't publicize every time they send an ROV down to explore shipwrecks looking for Doubloons. There's other researchers using larger ROVs for deeper dives for research purposes, but again, those things don't make the news the way space exploration does.
You don't need sonar to communicate with the bottom of the ocean; you can just string a wire down there from your surface vessel and get lightspeed communications. How do the ROVs communicate?