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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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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
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
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
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.
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).
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
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 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!
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.
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