The Search for Alien Artifacts Is Coming Into Focus

We cannot deny the lure of extraterrestrial artifacts. Science fiction is full of material remains of extraterrestrial civilizations, surfacing in everything from the classic books of Arthur C. Clarke to game franchises like Mass effect And Outer Wildlands.

The discovery of the first interstellar objects in the solar system over the past decade has sparked speculation that they could be extraterrestrial artifacts or spacecraft, although the scientific consensus remains that these three visitors have natural explanations.

That said, scientists have been anticipating the possibility of encountering extraterrestrial artifacts since the dawn of the space age.

“In the history of technosignatures, the possibility that there could be artifacts in the solar system has been around for a long time,” says Adam Frank, professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester.

“We’ve been thinking about this for decades. We’ve been waiting for this to happen,” he continues. “But being responsible scientists means holding to the highest standards of evidence and not crying wolf.”

This raises some interesting questions: What is the best way to search for extraterrestrial artifacts? And what should we do if we actually identify one? Given that these technosignatures could run the gamut from tiny specks of alloy to towering spaceships – or perhaps material unimaginable to Earthlings – it’s hard to know what to expect.

To address this challenge, researchers are currently working on a set of techniques to search for signs of extraterrestrial remains in our solar system, including in orbit around Earth.

For example, Beatriz Villarroel, assistant professor of astronomy at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics, focused on a largely untapped observational resource: historical images of the sky taken before the human space age.

By studying archival photographic observations captured by telescopes before the launch of Sputnik in 1957, Villarroel painted a portrait of the sky before it was speckled by our satellites. As head of the VASCO (Disappearance and Appearance of Sources during a Century of Observations) project, she was initially looking for evidence that stars, or other natural objects, might be disappearing on these archival plates.

Instead, Villarroel discovered inexplicable “transients” that resemble artificial satellites orbiting Earth, long before the launch of Sputnik, which she and her colleagues reported in 2021.

“That’s when I realized that this was actually a fantastic archive, not for looking for disappearing stars, but for looking for artifacts,” she says.

Last year, Villarroel and his colleagues published three more studies on the search for near-Earth extraterrestrial artifacts in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, and Scientific Reports that sparked lively debate among scientists. The researchers have suggested a range of alternative explanations for the transients, which could involve instrumental errors, meteors or debris from nuclear tests.

The mystery could potentially be solved with a dedicated mission to search for artifacts in geosynchronous orbit, an environment approximately 22,000 miles above Earth. However, Villarroel doubts that such a mission would get the green light from a federal space agency in the near term, due to the controversial nature of the subject.

“There are so many taboos that no one will ever take such results seriously until you launch such an investigation,” she adds.

Frank admits that the stigma of searching for otherworldly artifacts – and the search for extraterrestrial life, more broadly – ​​is counterproductive. But he considers the refusal of research on extraterrestrial artifacts to be a healthy and natural part of scientific research.