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Astronomers seek evidence of tech built by aliens:
An international team of scientists led by a prominent Harvard astronomer announced a new initiative Monday to look for evidence of technology built by extraterrestrial civilizations.
Called the Galileo Project, it envisages the creation of a global network of medium-sized telescopes, cameras and computers to investigate unidentified flying objects, and has so far been funded with $1.75 million from private donors.
Given recent research showing the prevalence of Earth-like planets throughout the galaxy, "We can no longer ignore the possibility that technological civilizations predated us," Professor Avi Loeb told reporters at a news conference.
"The impact of any discovery of extraterrestrial technology on science, our technology, and on our entire world view, would be enormous," he added in a statement.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 01 2021, @01:20AM (3 children)
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/are-we-earths-only-civilization/557180/ [theatlantic.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 01 2021, @01:23PM (1 child)
I'm not saying he's a crackpot, it's just that we can't prove he's not a crackpot.
Technological civilisations deposit low entropy constructions all over the place. We're also looking all over the place and have been for hundreds to thousands of years. Yet we've not discovered anything that could be considered to have come from a technological civilisation dropping low entropy evidence. And we know the rate at which entropy increases as we have seen what thousands of years can do.
When you are actually searching all over the place, absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 03 2021, @12:23AM
You say it like we've had lots of coverage in the search space. Just because it literally is a lot of searching for us as a species, doesn't mean we've actually covered a lot.
Absence of evidence in the result of a tiny fraction of the search space is just absence of effort not evidence.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Sunday August 01 2021, @07:16PM
Well, yes, intelligent Earth life could have arisen millions of years ago and gone extinct, for any number of reasons. Done in by another asteroid strike or supervolcano eruption, or of course caused their own demise in some fashion. I've heard before the idea that PETM could have been caused by industrialization. However, from all that I have read, it seems unlikely. We are still learning about intelligence-- what does it take to evolve intelligence? If that is really hard to do, it argues against some other species on Earth having accomplished that eons ago. And if they had managed it, why are they no longer around? Is it so easy for life to screw up and lose such an advance?