Researchers from the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center have developed a groundbreaking approach to predicting Earth’s technological landscape 1,000 years from now. This research could have profound implications for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and our understanding of advanced civilizations.
Bridging the Gap
The way we search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is limited by one thing: Our view of civilization and intelligence. Humanity is the only example of an advanced species that we know of, so anything we come up with on this subject has to be biased. Nonetheless, it opens the door to designing theoretical frameworks for finding technosignatures — the observable evidence of advanced technology on other worlds.
This where the team, led by Jacob Haqq-Misra of Blue Marble Space Institute of Science, did things a little differently. Instead of assuming that inevitable growth or civilizations having ever-greater need for energy was a universal law, they instead used ‘futures studies’ to investigate a broad range of possible social trajectories for an Earth techno sphere– the accumulated technological activity on our planet.
Exploring the Possibilities
Using a method they call general morphological analysis, the team systematically tried to consider all possible futures based on diverse environmental pressures of the political, economic, societal and technological type. It is given the background of these more informal projections that enabled them to aim beyond typical biases, and envision a wide range of different futures our civilization might have.
One of the most interesting findings in their analysis is that just one of the ten scenarios they created featured the fast, energy-intensive expansion predicted by the Kardashev Scale. In other scenarios, growth was slower, non-existant or incorporationed growth and collapse. This means that If We Were to Search for Technosignatures, They Should Not Merely be Looking for ‘advanced galactic-wide civilization including FERMIS idea Alone’ because many more other options equally or even most probably dominate / occur in the Universe.
The team identified a fair few potential technosignatures, among them differences in atmospheric composition like the presence of elevated amounts of nitrogen dioxide, which differentiate between a pre-agricultural Earth, its present state and even a more-built-out future. Curiously enough they also determined that in various cases the atmospheric spectra “could be indistinguishable from nature”, meaning there might still be technology present on a planet even if it lacks obvious technosignatures — we just need to look elsewhere in such a system!
Conclusion
Haqq-Misra and his team’s research thus represents an important advance in SETI as well as technosignature investigations. In doing so, the authors have here effectively laid a theoretical foundation for how researchers can conceive of technosignatures across planetary systems by an holistic and clean-slate approach to allowing scientists to model many different aspects of potential futures in Earth’s technosphere without bias. This is not only new in a way that obsoletes previous assumptions, it provides proponents of technology discovery with entire new classes of avenues to explore and resources to self-develop.
