Given the U.S. government disclosure of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), the UAP Science Advisory Council under my leadership is seeking signatures of technologies that are not human made. All we can do is use data from state-of-the-art sensors in search for unfamiliar outliers. While noticing UAP and anomalous interstellar objects, we may be blind to many others.
Obviously, our instruments are designed to measure what we already know exists. We detect electromagnetic radiation in particular wavelength bands, gravitational waves at the frequencies that our interferometers are sensitive to, particles that our colliders can produce. But we also know that our current detectors are blind to 95% of the mass-energy budget of the Universe.
Every measurement instrument reflects assumptions about what is worth measuring. For example, our sky survey strategy is tuned to asteroids or comets from the Solar System which move at about 0.0001 of the speed of light, c. A spacecraft moving at 0.1c would appear as a faint streak in 15-second exposures of the state-of-the-art Rubin observatory, and therefore be ignored by astronomers.
If a civilization evolved its technology along a different physics trajectory, they might use phenomena we have already observed but have not suspected is a technological substrate. There could also be a mismatch of timescales. A process that takes ten thousand years to complete a single step would appear to us as a static. We would not recognize it as technology in action. Similarly, technology that completes its operations in femtoseconds would appear to us as a burst of radiation, an “unexplained transient.”
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