A couple of scientists have considered how the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is conducted and, working off the idea that sufficiently advanced alien beings would at least attempt to build defensive structures around their world to defend against potentially catastrophic extraplanetary threats, suggest that one way such beings might be found would be through their defense systems. In fact, the scientists contend, the aliens would not necessarily have to be much more advanced than humans.
Inverse reported recently that Milan Cirkovic and Branislav Vukotic of the Astronomical Observatory of Belgrade have suggested in a study that searching for defensive structures that guard against something as devastating as a nearby (exploding) dying star could potentially lead to the discovery of intelligent alien beings. The duo posits that intelligent beings not much more advanced than humanity could erect artificial barriers or perhaps some type of megastructure to thwart an incoming threat like a gamma-ray blast or the expended electromagnetic energy of an exploding supernova.
Cirkovic and Vukotic write in the paper (per Business Insider), “For the present purposes, we note that no part of any spiral galaxy [like our Milky Way] can be considered safe from cosmic explosions in the long run. And as the timeframe considered by an intelligent species grows longer, more relevant becomes the issue of mitigation.”
Such mitigation would include planetary defense systems, something that our own planet has yet to develop but, Cirkovic and Vukotic believe, is well within humanity’s technological reach within the next century. An alien civilization just a few decades or more technologically advanced might have thought of and created such forms of mitigation already.
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