Rather than looking for aliens who use interstellar radio signals to say “hi," an alternative search strategy is simply to spy on any mega-engineering projects that an advanced civilization might be undertaking. Veteran SETI astronomer Jill Tarter calls this strategy "SETT" -- the Search for Extraterrestrial Technology.
A new science paper by Duncan Forgan at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and Martin Elvis at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., suggests we look for evidence of a very ambitious macro-engineering project: the wholesale mining of an asteroid belt. The asteroid material may be mined to build space colonies, solar power satellites or maybe even an entire "ringworld," as imagined by sci-fi writer Larry Niven.
How about the moon? After all, we were driving electric vehicles around and playing golf on it almost forty years ago. Strange that we left so abruptly and never returned. To read the rest of the article, click here.