The next major search for extraterrestrial intelligence might involve putting Moon dust under a microscope rather than pointing a radio telescope toward the stars. A new study led by SETI Institute Affiliate Scientist Lewis Pinault proposes searching lunar regolith for microscopic particles that could represent the surviving debris of extraterrestrial technology. Such material might have drifted between stars for millions or billions of years before eventually reaching the Moon. submitted by...

Official Study: Micron-Scale Technosignatures: How a Cubic Metre of Lunar Regolith May Begin to Constrain the Number of Past Technological Civilisations in the Galaxy “The Moon has been quietly accumulating material from space for billions of years, much of it likely billions of years older than the Moon itself,” Dr. Pinault said. “We’re asking whether that ancient collection might contain microscopic traces of technologies that existed long before humans ever looked up at the sky.” “Unlike E...

RT @MaxDerakhshani: When one of SETI Institute's scientists proposes there could be alien debris on the Moon, @nytimes laps it up. But when…

RT @MaxDerakhshani: When one of SETI Institute's scientists proposes there could be alien debris on the Moon, @nytimes laps it up. But when…

RT @DrBeaVillarroel: @SETIInstitute And some of us just look at the data.

Thought this community would appreciate it. Franck Marchis has spent 20+ years at SETI Institute studying asteroids and exoplanets, and his current obsession is a weird gap: with every camera and satellite pointed up, there's still no complete, continuous, verifiable record of what's overhead. ~99% of meteors entering the atmosphere go undetected. He's building an open network to close that gap and he's answering anything on r/IAmA today: HERE

Quick heads up: Franck Marchis (senior astronomer at SETI Institute, co-founded SkyMapper and Unistellar) is live on r/IAmA in about an hour. He's building SkyMapper, a decentralized network of sky cameras that records and timestamps everything overhead, 24/7, with cryptographically verifiable provenance. He's careful not to overclaim...his position is that we can't say anything rigorous about anomalous aerial events until the baseline data actually exists, and right now we detect barely 1% o...