SETI To Scour the Moon For Alien Footprints? 167
astroengine writes "Although we have an entire universe to seek out the proverbial alien needle in a haystack, perhaps looking in our own backyard would be a good place to start. That's the conclusions reached by Paul Davies and Robert Wagner of Arizona State University, anyway. The pair have published a paper in the journal Acta Astronautica detailing how SETI could carry out a low-cost crowdsourcing program (a la SETI@Home) to scour the lunar surface for alien artifacts, thereby gaining clues on whether intelligent aliens are out there and whether they've paid the solar system a visit in the moon's recent history."
Oh For Fuck's Sake (Score:4, Insightful)
Our own backyard? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Our own backyard? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:first (Score:5, Insightful)
Oceans destroy artifacts on the scale of years. One year in the Atlantic is worth a billion years on the moon.
Re:first (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think so. It takes ~1970 technology to reach the moon, along with a monstrous budget, yet it only takes a small budget and 1960 technology to reach the deepest point in the ocean:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathyscaphe_Trieste [wikipedia.org]
And how long do you think you'd take to survey the entire sea-bed that way?
I'm not saying it would be a bad idea; if nothing else it would probably find some interesting old wrecks, but I'd be surprised if it was as fast and cheap as surveying the lunar surface at resolutions high enough to spot any kind of alien prescence. That said, I very much doubt there's anything to see up there.
Re:first (Score:5, Insightful)
24 people have been to the moon, 2 to the bottom of the ocean. There are currently satellites orbiting the moon, there is nothing man made swimming around the bottom of the ocean right now. The first unmanned vehicle to go down there was in 1995, the last in 2009.
You can communicate with the moon in less than 2 seconds using radio waves. It takes 7 seconds for sonar to reach the bottom of the ocean.
There's apparently a $10,000,000 prize if you can get there twice