Signs of advanced extraterrestrial civilizations may be all around — if only we looked for them.
That’s the conclusion of a new paper penned by a team of researchers at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute. Pennsylvania State University astronomer Jason Wright and his colleagues argue that technological clues could be both common and easier to detect in space than biological signatures.
Technosignatures include radio signals, spacecraft activity, reflected light from construction, and pollution in the atmosphere of an exoplanet. All of these could tip off scientists on Earth to a far-away alien civilization, scientists not involved in the paper tell Inverse.
Wright and his colleagues argue that the raw mathematics of the search for intelligent life on other worlds might be less daunting than we’ve long assumed. If he and his colleagues are correct, the number of planets — or even star systems — where astronomers might find technosignatures could actually be larger than the number of planets where they might find signs of biological life.
The paper lays out a hypothesis that tech-savvy extraterrestrials may be easier to spot from Earth than myriad other inhabited worlds, even if they are teeming with life. An intelligent lifeform, the theory goes, could feasibly build radios, lasers, and spacecraft (not to mention things like theoretical mega-structures like Dyson spheres). If they can do these things, then it follows that they might also spread their technology across several planets, perhaps even star systems.
Like artificial products here on Earth, this technology could hang around longer than the civilization that built it, radiating technosignatures out into space or leaving unmistakable traces of life on exoplanets (like trash on Earth).
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