Scientists Are Hunting For Alien Artifacts Across The Solar System. Here's Why

Is aliens real? It's almost definitely. Our corner of the universe is not very special. Life probably did elsewhere if it came here.

This is a big assumption. It would take a single instance of archaebacteria-like organisms five superclusters away to say that there are aliens.

Wiretapping ET

If we want to find aliens, we should stay at home and look for techno-signatures.

What are they really like? We can make some good assumptions even though we don't know. When we use radios to communicate, we produce signals that are very different from what a star would give us.

It's reasonable to assume aliens would do the same thing, so we look for unnatural-looking radio signals far away in space.

The search for extra-terrestrial intelligence is referred to as the Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence. The SETI Institute leads SETI efforts. Citizen scientists sometimes make their own follow-up observations on possible detections after analyzing data.

Several candidate detections have been made but no confirmation has been made.

The universe is large and ancient. The sample size is a factor. If you scoop up a glass of ocean water and look for fish, you probably won't find any. Our odds of detection improve as we spend more time searching.

Are aliens nearby?

The Universe is large and ancient. Our entire Solar System needs more technology than Earth does to get here.

SETI can be accomplished from home. The same technology can be used to exchange messages. There isn't much reason to go. We should check. It's definitely true! Who knows what else we can learn even if we don't find aliens.

The size of the solar system is the first challenge. The Sun's average distance is 30AU. It is possible that the Oort cloud can reach 100,000AU from the Sun. Over 37 billion is the difference in volume to search.

If you were tasked with finding an alien in New York, the factor of difference in the search area was only 180.

One of the next big challenges is stealth. The aliens don't seem to be very interested in saying hello if they are here. Whether it's because their artifacts are not active, their sensors are passive, or they're just not there, it's still not known.

This dilemma is found in the second act of most submarine movies and you know the other guys are there. Sean Connery could be sent up there to make the aliens give us a ping.

The Galileo Project

The Galileo Project was founded in July of 2021. The term Extraterrestrial Technological Civilizations (ETCs) is mostly the same thing as the term Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

The Galileo team has brought a rational tone to the discussion. The project publicly commits to testing only known-physics hypotheses and analyzing only new data.

Agnostic to the outcome means that the only goal of the project is to gather and analyze data in a reliable and reproducible way. The Galileo Project is a breath of fresh air for anyone who is interested in ancient aliens.

There are three main experimental tracks of the Galileo project.

1. ImagingUnidentified Aerial Phenomena(UAP) in the infrared, radio, and optical bands and recording audio data. The team has designed, built, and deployed their own observation equipment and AI to gather and interpret these data (shown below). At the time of writing, the suite of instruments has been deployed for calibration and testing and will be redeployed for full operation in the next few months.
2. Rendezvousing with future InterStellar Objects (ISO's) passing through the Solar System like Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov, with an estimated project budget of just over $1 billion, or about one quarter the price of a single SLS launch.
3. Recovering the fragments from interstellar objects that collide with Earth, such as CNEOS 2014-01-08 that impacted off the coast of Papua New Guinea. At the time of writing, an expedition has just been fully funded, and production of specialized machinery has begun.
4. Searching for small alien satellites orbiting the Earth using the Vera C. Rubin Observatory when it comes online in 2023. This will require developing new advanced software to detect what would be very small and fast-moving objects, likely in irregular orbits. The AI will also scour data from human-made satellites for nearby alien techno-signatures.

The new strategy in SETI is to focus on physical artifacts. They say artifacts are less fleeting than radio signals.

An object wouldn't have to repeat itself if it was missed the first time. Physical objects in our universe are bound to it. Detection is less important for a physical object.

Life is startup life.

The Galileo project needs to do the most they can with what they have. The project was unable to detect a magnetic anomaly on the Moon and a time capsule for humans on Planet X. Three cost-effective ways to investigate three reasonable sets of assumptions of what alien visits might look like are exemplified by the experimental tracks.

The bottom line is that the lack of extraordinary evidence is often self inflicted. Project Galileo is asking one of humanity's most fundamental questions in a new way and is not investigating some triviality like black swans. Is we alone? Let's check the backyard first.

Would you like to be the first to know when the Galileo Project makes an interesting discovery? Follow@universetoday on the social media site. Don't forget to follow thegalileoproject1 There is a good chance that you will hear about it before your head of state.

This article was published in the past. The original article is worth a read.