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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."
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
It's behind a paywall, don't bother. disregard. A pity, sounds like an interesting idea, would have been nice to read about it.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I appreciate the idea of searching for extraterrestrial artifacts, but the moon does not seem a logical place for aliens to drop off their stuff. If anything, it seems far more likely that the earth would be such a place, seeing as it has life already (and has been far more active over the course of its history) so if it makes sense to search anywhere, it's here. I'm not sure what could really be accomplished by scouring the moon...
I enjoyed his Inherit the Stars series.
Mostly random stuff.
Not sure how feasible this would be to crowdsource. Wouldn't you need some reasonably trained eyeballs to avoid the cost and time of researching the "ooo I see a footprint" dead-ends?
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Crowdsourcing on the Moon could solve the population problem on Earth.
This may give them a leg up on the process:
http://www.marsanomalyresearch.com/evidence-directories/7-moon/moon-directory.htm
Trusting software vendors is no smarter than trus
Pffft. We all know the Prothean artifacts will be found on Mars. Lets start there.
Oceans destroy artifacts on the scale of years. One year in the Atlantic is worth a billion years on the moon.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Its probably easier to get to the moon than the bottom of the deepest oceans. An unmanned space craft doesn't have to deal with much pressure in space. the difference between space and earth sea level is only about 14psi. The bottom of the ocean has pressures over 15,000 psi
Besides, with plate techtonics, the ocean floor isn't really that old. Of the 4.5 billion years earth has been around, the atlantic ocean was only around for a few hundred million years.
The moon however, is pretty much a solid rock, there no known movements of its surface
There has also been life down in the oceans for over 3 billion years leaving its own traces
Wow, does this sounds like Sci-fi or what?
I can't read the article, but wouldn't it be better to plant non-visual clues if we were trying to signal to an alien civilization?
Maybe... concentric rings of something weird for the moon, like an obscure U isotope? with something cool buried at the bullseye?
A bored physicist spending too much time with a cyclotron separator on a lonely posting on the far end of the galaxy could be pretty entertaining if he got a bit squirrely in carrying out his mission. How about some weird isotope that is mostly stable and can only be made in a reactor? Maybe some Tc-98? The Ru-98 decay product is stable, and a high concentration of Ru-98 laying about would be almost as bizarre as finding Tc-98 laying about.
I think driving a mass spectrometer around the planets and moons would be an interesting scientific study regardless of SETI implications.
For that matter, if "they" planted a decorative geometric care package of Tc-98 on the moon, I'm not entirely clear why "they" couldn't have done something similar here, somewhere geologically stable-ish.
Interestingly enough, more than 100 yrs ago all this Tc-98 talk would have been meaningless. Its hard to say how future techs might find even weirder stuff. If there is any real world prime directive, it might not rely on being observed, the galactic "you must be this tall for the ride" chart might be observing something really weird once we have quantum computers or a convenient portable intense hand held source of higgs particles.
I would imagine a really bored physicist could do other odd Fortean stuff, like bury a giant freaking microwave waveguide turned into an interdigital filter with passbands such that you whack it with a strong white noise source the resulting output displayed on a spectrum analyzer is a crazy morse code/rs-232 like signal saying "hi", or maybe "dig here for care package". Even just burying radar retroreflectors in a geometric pattern would totally freak out the radar guys.
Note to boss: Do not send vlm on boring interplanetary field posting or he's really going to intensely F with the native's heads once he goes bonkers, or more bonkers anyway.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
http://www.viewzone.com/monalisa.html
I want to believe it's real - but if this really is on the moon then I think we'd have been visiting the moon more frequently to study its construction and the technology it would hold - but we haven't so for that reason I don't believe.
For reference here is the sort of image they will be looking at: http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/584640main_apollo17-right-670.jpg
This depends on the lunar regolith deposition rate, which I've seen quoted as 1 cm per 2-3 million years. Imagine Tranquility Base - which has over 100 man made artifacts on the surface (http://spacegrant.nmsu.edu/lunarlegacies/artifactlist.html) - in one million years from now, with half a centimeter of dust. This makes the lunar surface a time capsule of past activity (provided the site doesn't get wiped out by an asteroid impact), in a way that the Earth isn't. We've yet to photograph the surface at high enough resolution to really know what's there.
The moon however, is pretty much a solid rock, there no known movements of its surface
Oh, except for all the crap that has been sandblasting it since the dawn of time. Every time a new crater is formed, everything that is ejected out of the hole blankets the area around it, and the ground will quiver like a bell from the impact. While there doesn't appear to be any current tectonic activity, the surface of the moon is far from static.
Its probably easier to get to the moon than the bottom of the deepest oceans.
I don't think so. It takes ~1970 technology to reach the moon, along with a monstrous budget, yet it only takes a small budget and 1960 technology to reach the deepest point in the ocean:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathyscaphe_Trieste
A drunk loses the keys to his house and is looking for them under a lamppost. A policeman comes over and asks what he's doing.
"I'm looking for my keys" he says. "I lost them over there".
The policeman looks puzzled. "Then why are you looking for them all the way over here?"
"Because the light is so much better".
I don't think so. It takes ~1970 technology to reach the moon, along with a monstrous budget, yet it only takes a small budget and 1960 technology to reach the deepest point in the ocean:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathyscaphe_Trieste
And how long do you think you'd take to survey the entire sea-bed that way?
I'm not saying it would be a bad idea; if nothing else it would probably find some interesting old wrecks, but I'd be surprised if it was as fast and cheap as surveying the lunar surface at resolutions high enough to spot any kind of alien prescence. That said, I very much doubt there's anything to see up there.
I accidentally left out the entire word "seriously" there.
But you get the idea.
--
BMO
And how long do you think you'd take to survey the entire sea-bed that way?
I never said it was fast, I was just countering the earlier assertion that it's easier to get to the moon than the bottom of the deepest ocean, because we did the latter a full decade before the former, with a much smaller budget too. And our moon missions didn't exactly cover a lot of territory on the moon, either, they just landed at a pre-selected spot, walked around a bit (drove around in some later missions), collected some rocks, planted a flag, and left.
With modern ROV technology, I doubt it'd be that much harder to survey the entire sea-bed than to survey the entire moon (it'd be slower because of the medium, and also because the earth is much bigger than the moon even if you only survey the underwater parts).
Near the lamppost.
Why?
"Because that's where the light is!"
Sort of the same reasoning is at play here, we are looking for the "keys" on the moon not because that's the best way to find SETI but because well it's "easy" (just crowd source it) and cheap (as long as we've already got hi-res photos of much of the moons surface).
It should not be viewed as a replacement for other more serious efforts (that will actually cost money).
I would say it's pretty much pointless, but won't do any harm.
Why do I think it's pointless? Well, I don't think that aliens visited. While I don't doubt very much there's life elsewhere, maybe even intelligent life, maybe even life with a civilisation that came up with technology, I doubt very much that faster-than-light travel is possible. Still, who knows?
IF there were aliens visiting our system, having them leave some sign on the Moon isn't that silly an idea. Things there will last a long time and if they wanted to make sure that we will find it some day, it's a good place. We would need fairly good science and technology to spot it in the first place and even better to reach it, which makes sure we won't just destroy or forget it immediately. Putting something in orbit where we could spot it even after a billion years is hard. Digging something like perfectly straight trenches forming a cross or a square on the Moon (and maybe dig in a time capsule in the center) is easy and it would last a very long time there.
Of course if you crowdsource such a search there will be no shortage of idiots seeing things in perfectly natural shadows and whatever. Better use software to look for straight lines and geometric shapes. I doubt it will find anything worthwhile, but it's surely fun and shouldn't be too hard to do anyway.
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
For the low low price of $0.05 per 5 pictures, tons of poor dweebs and Indians (from India) will do it on Amazon's Mechanical Turk. :-P
Silence is a state of mime.
This is not really a bad idea, considering as well the moon has little erosion, you wouldnt just be looking for something in the recent history, but considering the moon is 4.5 billion years old, there is a possibility that someone could have been there in the past. It is sort of ridiculous to assume that if intelligent life did visit the moon that it would have done so, just in the past few years, or that, some past vist there long ago would be of no interest, of course it would be of interest. Also consider the fact that if an ET visited this area long ago, maybe 5 million years ago, any evidence on earth could easily disappear due to erosion, however, things would be much better preserved on the moon, if they had for whatever reason decided to land on the moon. Another theory is that there may be some universal prime directive treaty, where you cant mess with life on a planet, since the moon has no life on it, if you were an ET and wanted to watch and study the earth from afar withouit landing their, the moon might be a good location to do so.
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?
The moon is no longer really out of reach of private activity. For the moment it still takes noticeable economic activity, but don't count it staying that way.
The problem is most of the ocean is dark. Like, really, really, dark. The depth alone isn't a problem. The darkness, combined with the extremely limited visibility, is. You can see the entire surface of the moon from, well, just step outside on a night with a full moon. The bottom of ocean? Not so much. You can even make a precise survey of the lunar surface's height using laser rangefinding. Down to about 40m (vertical, 100m horizontal), which isn't bad at all. The closest thing for the ocean is sonar, and that is nowhere near as precise.
Don't remember where I heard it, but some scientist once commented that we know more about the surface of Mars than we do about our own ocean. It is surprisingly difficult to survey the ocean. According to the NOAA: "Yet for all of our reliance on the ocean, 95 percent of this realm remains unexplored, unseen by human eyes." (source). There is a reason we are still discovering new life in the ocean (and a lot of it too).
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
I was just countering the earlier assertion that it's easier to get to the moon than the bottom of the deepest ocean, because we did the latter a full decade before the former, with a much smaller budget too. And our moon missions didn't exactly cover a lot of territory on the moon, either
Lunar Orbiter surveyed pretty much the entire moon in the mid-60s. The resolution wasn't enough to see alien footprints, but that was limited by the camera technology of the time.
I didn't provide a citation because it was one click away from the link you provided previously.
Cables aren't very robust. The first unmanned vehicle to go down there is MIA after its cable broke in 2003. Its replacement hasn't ventured to the bottom of challenger deep yet.
but all those craters were made over the last four billion years. There's only two inches of dust (on average) accumulated in that time!
This seems like a job for computers. They don't have to recognize what an image is; they just have to recognize that it's "sufficiently anomalous to what is typical of the lunar landscape". If nothing else, use image recognition to flag "interesting" areas for further inspection by a human being.
that's silly, we're already in the gravity well. Approaching from space, which is easier to reach and return? remember a starship could have a fusion drive that works for months or years to get to near light speed at less than one gee acceleration, but that won't get you off Earth, but could well get you to and off the moon.
Richard Hoaglund must be fired up about this. They ever figure out what that equilateral triangle in that one crater was?
Great! Where do I sign up?
(No, I didn't read the article)
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
... they're covering their tracks as we speak.
-- john
... what need would they have of anything at the bottom of a energetically expensive gravity well? Covering interstellar distance at less than light speed necessitates adaptation to micro-gravity. Covering interstellar distance faster than light would require manipulating the laws of physics in a way that artificial gravity wouldn't seem difficult. So you'd eliminate the need to cater for fleshy gravity-adapted bodies that suffer in microgravity. Either way the technological level required for these feats makes biological engineering or mind uploading etc seem trivial. It's all moot if they decide to clean up after themselves, and finally with all that technology they would also find it rather easy to stay hidden entirely, as they do all the science on us they want. (Bare in mind we do similar things with wildlife, studying them without disturbing them).
If they really needed to mine some in-system resources, they would have mined asteroids. HINT Look for asteroid mining and weird shit left behind at Lagrange points.
It's already unlikely but I seriously doubt any alien artifacts or footprints would be found on the moon, even if they had visited. At best perhaps a unexplained scoop mark or bore hole where a sample was taken by some automated probe. Hardly great evidence of ET, just weird and tantalizing. As for Earth, ET may not want to interfere. Much as these days we try not to disturb wildlife, prefer only to investigate and observe (much more scientific value in a pristine environment than one that has been contaminated). They may also be weary of leaving any unmistakable trace of anything extraterrestrial, especially on such an obvious destination (moon) for a fledgling space-faring civilization to stumble upon. Historically contact between previously isolated cultures of different technological level didn't turn out so well.
I think aliens showing up in fleshy bodies is by far the least likely ET contact scenario. Right up there with finding some of their refuse they dumped in a crater on our moon. Somewhere down the list, finding trojan asteroids mysteriously stripped of particular metals or organics. I support SETI in principal, but I'm just realistic: if aliens were here, there's little reason we'd be aware of it, even if we went looking.
It stands to reason that intelligent ETs will have a strong desire to find other life and actually send out missions to make contact, and at very least survey it's sky for other habitable worlds. I'd put money down on the fact we've probably already been observed, in great detail.
A hint for the SETI guys: don't look at the moon, start looking closely for near-earth asteroids that buzz us on unusual trajectories, because it could be staring back.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Let's assume that the Aliens DID leave us some thing on the moon for us to find and it's pretty small and non-obvious from a distance (like a giant set of intersecting lines at the center of a huge circle). Don't ask me why, maybe they were lazy or they didn't want something that could be discovered by just looking through a telescope on earth.
Aside from the ideas previously expressed using some sort of technological marker (radioactivity, isotopes or, as in "2001" a magnetic anomaly) where would they put this artifact? Here are some proposed locations:
Assuming that the moon is tidally locked to earth for a LONG time, at the point closest to earth (or on the far side, furthest from earth).
If the moon is not tidally locked for a sufficient period but its orbital axis IS stable, how about at the pole(s)?
Any other ideas? Leading/trailing edge of the moon? In the center of a big (biggest) crater? Tallest mountain or deepest canyon?
Hell, why not just put some stuff in a Trojan or Lagrangian point.
Why post something that costs $31.00.
That any advanced alien race has *ever* visited the vicinity of our world. As Douglas Adams put it, "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."
That's not to say I don't think that extraterrestrial life exists. It almost certainly does. Is some of that life intelligent? Maybe. Is that intelligent life (barring superluminal space travel) close enough to our solar system to warrant sending a probe/ship/monolith? Unlikely, but possible.
I think someone was having trouble coming up with a good idea for a grant application and wrote up a proposal after watching 2001: A Space Odyssey.
All that said, if the data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is complete enough, it couldn't hurt to analyze the data to see if there's anything anomalous. In fact, I think it's a good idea. We will probably get some unexpected and possibly even interesting results that have nothing to do with extraterrestrial intelligence.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
This is an incredibly stupid idea, so much so that it's making me suspect that SETI people don't really care about science. The obvious problem is that we don't know what "alien footprints" look like. Therefore, the searchers are basically supposed to report anything which looks significant or weird to them.
Here is what I predict: We won't discover an alien capsule, but we'll definitely see formations where aliens arranged rocks to look like
1. some Egyptian heiroglyph, 2. an uncanny likeness of a human face, 3. the English word "Hi", possibly with an exclamation mark after it, 3. a strangely "perfect" hexagon, 4. a site that appears "flattened" in roughly a circular are, with a strange smudge in the exact center, and reminds us of a launching pad, 5. a large collection of "depictions of human shapes", 6. something that looks like the Virgin Mary or an angel or Jesus, 7. etc.We might as well ask people to find traces of alien-made shapes in the clouds that float overhead. Yes, we would "find" a million such traces, because of how human perception works. There is a bunny! And then, we can easily use our creativity to weave a story about what aliens are trying to accomplish by making a bunny-shaped cloud. Well, multiply this by millions and take it to the moon, and you have the makings of a fiasco. Thousands of idiots will be printing the latest picture of a "weird-looking lunar thing" in newspaper, along with giant headlines like "Is this an ancient alien archeological dig on the moon?" In the article, various experts who said "Well, it seems highly unlikely, but we can't in principle rule out that it could be" will be quoted as saying "It could be!". Then the History Channel will do a special "Aliens on the Moon?" and soon and moon alien "truthers" will organize on the internet.
What I'm saying is that a great deal of harm to science will come of this. It's exactly the sort of project that will give a megaphone to the world's idiots (because they will be the ones saying something interesting) and will make real scientists seem even more like conspirers who try to deny some deep reality that "real people" want to believe in, because they will be saying true but unpleasant things about human pattern recognition, how our perception plays tricks on us, how big interstellar space is and how slow the speed limit of our universe is. People on slashdot might not appreciate the full extent of this, but there are many people in the world who want to take down science and replace it with superstition. Some are even quite savvy with PR. It will be that much easier to marginalize the sane voices because everyone will point out that after all the real scientists who asked us to start this search, namely SETI, are a legitimate organization. So far that's more or less true, but if they really want to undertake something this pointless and dangerous, I will take this back.
You wouldn't use ROV technology - or at least, I wouldn't use ROV technology.
Note : an ROV, as the term is conventionally used in the industry for which it was invented, is a mobile, self propelled platform capable of carrying both sensors (cameras, lights, sonar, ultrasonic distance finders ...) AND actuators (grippers, cutters, turning devices, sometimes welding equipment) and moving them around in the sea, being powered and controlled controlled by people on the surface.
The actuators for a start are unnecessary for survey work - which halves the individual complexity of a machine. Much of the steering equipment is also unnecessary ; another substantial saving. Lights and cameras ... produce pretty pictures, but only have depth-of-view of a few 10s of metres, limiting the spacing you can apply between machines.
I'd start from a different place : take an old, off the shelf seismic survey boat. Replace the 4-16 streamers of geophones, each up to 10s of km long, with an array of 10s-of-km long cables, each towing a relatively dumb side-scan sonar sonde with some side-to-side and up-and-down steering capabilities when under tow (this, so far, is an existing suite of technology ; it's used for surveying pipeline routes, existing submarine equipment, etc).
Side-scan sonar can have an effective range of up to a kilometre or so, depending on distance from seabed. For that, you need the up-down steering and some logic (on surface or in-water ; "meh"). To space the sondes laterally (compared to the route of tow) you need the lateral steerage ; you might also need to dedicate the most lateral strings of the boat to sondes that have GPS/ GLONASS/ whatever receivers above-water and positioning sounders under water (again - this technology already exists in the seismic industry) ; by triangulation form the sounders, you can have very-fine grained positioning of the side-scan sondes and position them where you want them.
I think that's about it. The technology to do (about) a 10km swathe at some 10knots, to nearly arbitrary depth (cable length, topography roughness being the main constraints), with better than 0.1m resolution and few-metre accuracy is more-or less off-the shelf.
Who's going to pay? That's the big question.
The next step up, if it was worth going there, would be to get rid of the towing/ data storage vessel by using autonomous vehicles. Unfortunately, that means that either you only measure where the currents take you, or you have to regularly retrieve and re-fuel (re-charge) your "autonomous" vehicles. Which renders the "autonomous" idea a bit moot.
I know people who do sea-bed surveying for a living. It's mostly horrendously tedious.
It's also not cheap.
Looking for "interesting stuff" ... you can do coarsely from the surface, where "stuff>10m" might be a target, using a long-range, low resolution sonar combined with magnetometry (assuming that "ferruginous" = "interesting"), but again the days-at-sea are not cheap. And that's why it's only covered a relatively small part of the oceans.
You could, I guess, put a sonar sonde on a cable, and trail it behind an aircraft (with a magnetometer, why not?) ... but flying hours are not cheap either. Though you may get larger area/ lower resolution surveying done faster. (Didn't the military do this when sub-hunting in the past?)
How does that old joke go? Resolution, coverage, low cost - choose any two.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
...everyone already knows the aliens are hiding ON THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON!!!
SETI is mostly funded through private monies if people want to fund them then why shouldn't they be allowed to continue to operate?
"There is compelling evidence [that] fine particles of moondust, when sufficiently charged-up, actually float above the lunar surface. This could create a temporary nighttime atmosphere of dust ready to blacken spacesuits, clog machinery, scratch faceplates (moondust) is very abrasive) and generally make life difficult for astronauts."
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2008/17apr_magnetotail/
If this is the case then SETI may be wasting their time looking for any kind of ancient tracks in the dust on the moon.
Christianity was not created as a control mechanism to give people at the top power and wealth. You're thinking of Catholicism. They are not the same thing. Of course, the Catholic church claims to be the authorized Christian religion, and has done many things while claiming to act in God's name--but their claiming things does not make such things true. The Christianity that Jesus proclaimed is not like that at all. Catholicism is a human distortion of God's plan--the same could be said for other "versions" of Christianity.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
The moon is heavily populated. Go look for your self. www.mapaplanet.org and have a look. I found a station the size of Alemeda there over the weekend on the farside (53.77Long x -32.28lat), and most of the craters either have buildings in them or have been domed over with what looks like ice. They glow in the UV band from whatever their power/light sources are. This whole "We are the only ones in the neighborhood" crap is just that, CRAP! They are here, leaving us alone for the most part and living NICELY on the Moon!
Most people are mostly good most of the time.
This is an excellent example of how science should not be done. Let's just keep one foot on the ground,do a thorough examination of the surface of Luna,and maybe we'll find something other than a coke can and an American flag. To begin the whole process by saying "we're looking for evidence of extraterrestrial beings"...is what I call unhealthy bias. Especially,as has already been noted,we don't have the slightest idea of what we'd be looking for. (perhaps looking for aliens is the only way to get people interested in any survey at all).
The "aliens have visited the moon" is a pretty common trope in SF (2001: A Space Odyssey, In the Ocean of Night, Inherit the Stars, and many others).
While this makes a tolerable MacGuffin, somebody probably needs to tell these guys that it's not real.
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for slashdot.sig (129323052 bytes).
Davies imagines some aliens who don't subscribe to the Leave No Trace ethic. Such anthropomorphic aliens suggest that he's been watching too much Star Trek. "If we can put a man on the Moon..." then we can avoid leaving tracks easily visible from miles away. Apollo was meant to leave tracks—on the Moon and in history books. Did alien observers wish their presence to be discovered later but not while they were here? Only that would explain such reckless ET behavior to me, but even so, I agree that it's worthwhile to look.