https://lifeboat.com/blog/2012/01/artifacts-in-the-solar-system Safeguarding Humanity Thu, 19 Jan 2012 15:00:24 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.6.1 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2012/01/artifacts-in-the-solar-system#comment-100203 Thu, 19 Jan 2012 15:00:24 +0000 http://lifeboat.com/blog/?p=2979#comment-100203 The Haqq-Misra paper reminds us to keep our minds open about what qualifies as evidence of ETI. Artifacts may not be recent; old ones may be dead, non-emitting technology, very difficult to find.
Eves is right about the energy requirments of braking; our own first interstellar probes may be fly-throughs. Perhaps braking will be used only in follow-up missions, if the fly-through probes find something of great interest. Project Daedalus proposed launching much smaller sub-probes that would remain in the target system, but that implies a massive mother probe.

]]> https://lifeboat.com/blog/2012/01/artifacts-in-the-solar-system#comment-100131 Wed, 18 Jan 2012 08:38:10 +0000 http://lifeboat.com/blog/?p=2979#comment-100131 A challenge for ETI exploratory missions, just as for our own probes to the outer solar system, is stopping once you get to your destination. Travelling between stars in any sensible timeframe involves accelerating hardware to prodigious velocities; and that’s hard. The braking manoeuvres required to leave any detectable ETI artefacts in our solar system would be harder still.

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