Searching for Alien Civilizations in Moon Dust

11:02 AM ETDeveloping

Science Desk

In Short: The Moon has been quietly accumulating material from space for billions of years, much of it likely billions of years older than the Moon itself, according to Dr. Pinault.

The Moon has been quietly accumulating material from space for billions of years, much of it likely billions of years older than the Moon itself, according to Dr. Pinault. This concept, proposed by Ukrainian astronomer Oleksiy Arkhipov in the 1990s, suggests that microscopic debris from alien spacecraft or industrial activity could drift across interstellar space and accumulate on stable surfaces like the Moon’s regolith.

In a new paper, Lewis J Pinault and his co-authors propose an alternative approach to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) by focusing on finding physical artefacts that could only have been created by intelligent aliens, rather than relying on radio signals. They argue that the Moon is an excellent place to look for these technosignatures because it acts as a 'garbage collector' for interstellar debris.

The researchers explain that these technological materials, traveling through space, are subjected to cosmic rays and interstellar dust, making them more durable and likely to survive impacts. This approach addresses the 'synchronicity' problem of assuming that alien civilizations are currently broadcasting radio signals, as the Milky Way is around 13 billion years old and such civilizations might not be active now but were in the past.

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“The concept of searching the lunar regolith for microscopic technosignatures is at once extraordinarily original and eminently reasonable,” said Bill Diamond, SETI Institute President and CEO.
They found that sufficiently tough, refractory particles could travel thousands of light-years over hundreds of millions to billions of years, occasionally arriving at the Earth-Moon system slowly enough — thanks to solar radiation pressure and the Sun’s magnetic ‘bubble,’ the heliosphere — to survive impact rather than vaporize.
But, according to a new paper available in pre-print on arXiv and submitted to the International Journal of Astrobiology by Lewis J Pinault, as associated researcher at the SETI Institute, and his co-authors, we could take a completely alternative approach to trying to find alien civilizations - by looking for evidence of them in lunar dirt.
The Milky Way is around 13 billion years old - hoping that we exist at the same time as an alien civilization that happens to be actively messaging is a huge leap of faith.
To be clear, it doesn’t mean that aliens once lived on the Moon.
But, the moon is a really, really good garbage collector.
If an alien civilization decides to build a Dyson swarm, some parts of it will inevitably be destroyed over time.

Sources

Universe Todaylink