Monday, July 22, 2013

On the likelihood of non-terrestrial artifacts in the Solar System

Extraterrestrial technology may exist in the Solar System without our knowledge. This is because the vastness of space, combined with our limited searches to date, implies that any remote unpiloted exploratory probes of extraterrestrial origin would likely remain unnoticed. Here we develop a probabilistic approach to quantify our certainty (or uncertainty) of the existence of such technology in the Solar System. We discuss some possible strategies for improving this uncertainty that include analysis of moon- and Mars-orbiting satellite data as well as continued exploration of the Solar System.
Comments: Accepted for publication in Acta Astronautica
Subjects: Popular Physics (physics.pop-ph); Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP); Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
Journal reference: Acta Astronautica (2012) 72:15-20
DOI: 10.1016/j.actaastro.2011.10.010
Cite as: arXiv:1111.1212 [physics.pop-ph]
  (or arXiv:1111.1212v1 [physics.pop-ph] for this version)

Submission history

From: Jacob Haqq-Misra [view email]
[v1] Fri, 4 Nov 2011 18:51:58 GMT (143kb)

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