Wild New Paper Suggests We Could Detect Gravitational Waves From Alien Megacraft

There is a question of whether intelligent alien life exists in the broader Milky Way.

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory should be able to detect the waves generated by extraterrestrial mega- technology according to a new paper penned by an international group of scientists.

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence would be extended beyond Earth's closest neighbors to all the stars in the universe.

The paper will be submitted to the monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. On the arXiv server, it can be found.

One of the biggest open questions is whether or not Earth is alone in the Universe in hosting intelligent life. Only a few tens of thousands of stars can we find recognizable technology. The kind of waves we use to communicate weakens as it spreads, making it hard to sift out the noise past a couple hundred light years.

The signals from the waves are not the same. They can be detected across larger distances. We might be able to detect it if there was an intelligent alien civilization with technology that could create powerful waves.

The only way we can see the universe that doesn't rely on light is by using gnatational waves. Here on Earth, the waves we've detected have been produced by the collision of large objects. The ripples in the fabric of space-time are caused by the inspiral and collision of stellar corpses.

Any object with mass that increases in mass creates waves. Our current detection capabilities are not big enough for the waves produced by a rocket. It would have to be pretty amazing for an alien civilization to have the technology to produce waves like that.

The size and speed of an alien spaceship that would be detected by LIGO was calculated by the researchers.

With a warp drive that could accelerate to 10 percent of the speed of light, LIGO is able to detect a RAMAcraft around the mass of Jupiter. We would be able to detect it if it were to operate around 100 kiloparsecs.

The stars of our home galaxy are covered by the disk of the Milky Way.

The study of warp drives paved the way for the detection of waves.

We already have the ability to probe all 11 stars in the Milky Way for warp drives, and soon, the ability to probe thousands of other galaxies, thanks to this new method.

The researchers say that the proposed detectors for future development should be 100 times more sensitive than LIGO.

There are a lot of big ifs. The team hopes to use their methods to find smaller objects closer to home. The searches would turn the waves into units.

Gravitational wave detection is still in its infancy, according to the researchers.

The detection of these objects may become a regular occurrence as the sensitivity of the detectors increases. It would be interesting to complete a full search for these objects.

The research can be found on arXiv.