A 2018 report published by the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) shows the lengths America's premier space agency is willing to consider when proving the existence of intelligent alien life.
Entitled
NASA and The Search For Technosignatures, the 70-page document details all of the various ways space scientists considered intelligent extraterrestrial life might be located during
NASA's Technosignatures Workshop, hosted in Houston, Texas, September 26-28, 2018.
Numerous novel methods for detecting traces of advanced alien technology are discussed in the report. Yet one section is particularly intriguing.
Described as "interlopers," NASA scientists discussed the potential for extraterrestrial probes to not only travel through our planetary neighborhood but also to have accidentally or intentionally landed on one or more planets or numerous natural satellites in our solar system. Even more striking, NASA says explicitly, "it is even possible that the Earth itself hosts such artifacts."
While the topic of crashed alien technology is marred by unscientific lore, a growing number of scientists are saying the proof of alien life could be closer to home than we realize.
"Yes, I think the idea of searching our solar neighborhood for evidence of extraterrestrial technology is worth doing," astrobiologist and research scientist at Blue Marble Space Institute of Science, Dr. Jacob Haqq-Misra, told
The Debrief. "We do not know how prevalent life or technology is in our galaxy, and so we cannot easily assign any probabilities to say that technology is more or less likely on an exoplanet versus in our solar system."
THE HUNT FOR LOST ALIEN ARTIFACTS
For over five decades, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence has almost exclusively focused on monitoring the sky for signals that could represent a distant advanced alien civilization. However, for as many years, scientists have quietly discussed the possibility that evidence for advanced alien life could be closer than we realize in the form of relics or artifacts.
Largely thanks to technological advances, in recent years, a handful of scientists have slowly started coming forward and saying that the hunt for nearby alien relics is something that merits serious consideration.
In 2011, physicist Dr. Paul Davies and researcher Robert Wagner of Arizona State University
authored a paper proposing that photographic mapping captured by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter could be used to search for possible alien artifacts on the surface of the Moon.
Speaking with
The Debrief, Dr. Davies explained the conditions on the Moon are ideal for preserving trace evidence of artificial influence or alien artifacts.
"The Moon is almost inert, and so objects and features on the surface are preserved for an immense duration. Eventually, the material thrown up by meteor impacts erases records, but a large object on the Moon might remain detectable for tens of millions of years," said Dr. Davies, who also authored the book:
The Eerie Silence: Are We Alone in the Universe?
Dr. Haqq-Misra also points out that NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has captured equally voluminous numbers of high-resolution images of Mars. "There are thousands of such images, and so it is possible that an anomalous artifact could be captured in such images without anybody noticing yet," explained Dr. Haqq-Misra.
Outside of the Moon and Mars, scientists know even less about the surfaces of other bodies in our solar system.
In a 2012 paper entitled:
On the Likelihood of Non-Terrestrial Artifacts in the Solar System, Dr. Haqq-Misra and NASA physicist Dr. Ravi Kumar Kopparapu said the lack of complete analysis ultimately makes it impossible to say just how likely it is or isn't that alien technology could be lying about in our celestial neighborhood. "We cannot place very strong limits on the absence of extraterrestrial technology in the solar system until we perform more complete analyses to rule out such possibilities," said Dr. Haqq-Misra.
Dr. Haqq-Misra points to advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning as ways that might help the search for anomalies in existing surface imagery.
One such technique, discussed in a
paper published in early 2020, showed that researchers could successfully apply unsupervised distributed machine learning to detect surface anomalies in remote sensing and space science. "This approach could conceivably detect artifacts on the surface of the Moon that would not have been easily noticed by naked eye analysis," explains Dr. Haqq-Misra.
"One way to check such algorithms is to ensure that they can find the original Apollo landing site, which I believe this algorithm succeeds at. However, any artifacts that are camouflaged or covered in dust would not be possible to detect through such machine learning analysis," Dr. Haqq-Misra cautions.