This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Most of our experience with the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has focused on capturing radio signals that alien species have sent out, whether intentionally or unintentionally. That creates a huge "synchronicity" problem—what if there aren't any alien civilizations broadcasting radio signals now, but there were a billion years ago?
The Milky Way is around 13 billion years old—hoping that we exist at the same time as an alien civilization that happens to be actively messaging is a huge leap of faith. But according to a new paper available as a preprint on arXiv and submitted to the International Journal of Astrobiology by Lewis J. Pinault, an associate researcher at the SETI Institute, and his co-authors, we could take a completely different approach to trying to find alien civilizations—by looking for evidence of them in lunar dirt.
That idea is not as crazy as it sounds. To be clear, it doesn't mean that aliens once lived on the moon—or anywhere in the solar system, for that matter. But the moon is a really, really good garbage collector.
The idea proposed in the paper is that, instead of looking for simple radio waves, we should look for physical artifacts that could only have been created by intelligent aliens, and the moon is a great place to look for them. Firstly, what does "artifacts" in this case actually mean? The paper discusses two different types of particles.
One is an Arkhipov particle, named after Ukrainian astronomer Alexei Arkhipov, who first floated this idea in the 1990s. These are tiny pieces of unintentional industrial debris. If an alien civilization decides to build a Dyson swarm, some parts of it will inevitably be destroyed over time.
Fragments from that destruction could be pushed out of the star system that hosted that megastructure, and they could eventually make their way to our own solar system. This isn't as far-fetched as it sounds, as the sun rotates all the way around the Milky Way once every approximately 230 million years—and the Milky Way itself is around 13 billion years old. So our own solar system has already traveled through much of the galaxy repeatedly.
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