NASA scientists explore the intriguing possibility that highly advanced extraterrestrial civilizations may be harder to detect than we expect, as their energy requirements could be surprisingly modest, challenging our conventional assumptions about how we might spot signs of their technological prowess.
The Fermi Paradox Revisited
This could have big implications for the Fermi paradox, which wonders why decades into this vast, ancient universe and we haven’t had any undeniable proof of alien civilizations.
One possible explanation, the researchers have posited, is that societies at our current level of technological development simply cannot; but perhaps advanced extraterrestrial societies would see no need to enslave the galaxy in such activity, and could subsist quite comfortably on even a massive population base and high standard of living assuming more economically sustainable methods for obtaining energy supplies. Unlike ATC systems like the Tipler Cylinder, which require vast amounts of energy and materials to construct, these civilizations would prefer to keep closer to their home planets or star systems except building such massive structures; thus making them more difficult for us Earthlings to detect.
Spotting Solar Panel Techno signatures is Hard
This is like filling a planet with Earth-like technology and measuring what the brightness of this artificial biosphere would be in a telescope like the one being proposed by NASA to look for life on planets around other stars within the next few decades (the Habitable Worlds Observatory) if it were at different stages of technological development.
The answer is quite a bit: they discovered that such a telescope would have to observe an Earth-like exoplanet for hundreds of hours just to see signs of the solar panels covering 23% of its land area. Even allowing for high-living-standard human population of 30 billion, energy requirements would only need about 8.9% solar-panel coverage.
This means that those extraterrestrial civilizations are more likely to be able to conceal their energy-harvesting structures from Existing or near-future telescopes we were planning, creating a significant observational hurdle for our techno signatures.
Conclusion
What they found may force us to fundamentally rethink how we could look for signs of other intelligent life in the universe. Their suggestion that such civilizations might need remarkably little energy has provided a new direction and prompted us to re-evaluate our tactics for the hunt for intelligent alien life. The study in question (which NGTS is involved with) serves as a cautionary tale, one reminding us that the universe is perfectly capable of amazing us beyond our preconceptions — there may be plenty out there to boggle the mind, and we must remain open-minded and flexible as we continue to learn more about it.
