14 DAY TRIAL // Scientists at NASA have lately began to wonder as to whether the planet-seeking telescope they operate would be capable of picking up signs of alien civilizations, and the artifacts that their macro-engineering of the Galaxy or the Universe would leave behind.
Some experts have proposed a long time ago that an ancient, highly-advanced alien civilization would eventually develop the capabilities to engineer the Cosmos at a large scale. What this means is that they could alter entire galaxy to suit life.
But such tremendous efforts would leave behind some traces of their existence, investigators propose, and the NASA Kepler Telescope might just be sensitive enough to pick them up, Daily Galaxy reports.
“Life may succeed against all odds in molding the Universe to its own purposes. And the design of the inanimate Universe may not be as detached from the potentialities of life and intelligence as scientists of the 20th century have tended to suppose,” said Freeman Dyson.
The world-renowned physicist, who was based at the Princeton University Advanced Institute of Study, made the assumption that such a civilization exists, and that it is much older than Earth's is.
Our planet coalesced from the Sun's protoplanetary disk around 4.5 billion years ago, and the earliest lifeforms developed hundreds of millions of years afterwards. The Great Oxygenation Event, about half a billion years ago, marks the true explosion of biodiversity here.
Astronomical Observatory of Belgrade expert Milan Cirkovic agrees with what Dyson said. In new proposal, he says that humankind is wrong to search for radio, laser and microwave signals from aliens.
Rather, what we should be focusing our attention on is finding structures such as Dyson spheres. There are large, solar system-sized clusters of rotating objects, that potentially create an artificial habitat for life within the Milky Way or another galaxy.
“It seems preposterous even to contemplate any possibility of communication between us and billion-year old super civilizations,” the Serbian expert writes in a new paper.
“Even if they are not actively communicating with us, that does not mean that we cannot detect them and their astro-engineering activities,” the investigator goes on to add.
“Their detection signatures may be much older than their communication signatures. Unless they have taken great lengths to hide or disguise their detection signatures, the terrestrial observer should still be able to observe them at those wavelengths and those should be distinguishable from normal stellar spectra,” he concludes.