Posthuman Blues

But what if no one's out there at all?

My jaw almost dropped when I read this part:

One idea - to be outlined by Dr Ian Crawford of Birkbeck College, London - involves using Nasa's next manned missions to the moon to search its surface for space debris from alien civilisations. 'We are not talking about digging up monoliths like those in 2001: A Space Odyssey,' he said. 'The idea is to look for microscopic fragments of alien spacecraft.'

Russian scientists have calculated that a civilisation capable of space travel would produce massive amounts of debris, like the space junk - old rocket boosters, lens caps dropped by astronauts - that is building up around Earth today. This alien detritus, which would include microscopic particles shorn from spacecraft, could have drifted across space for billion of years, eventually becoming embedded on our moon and ready for astronauts to dig them up. Crawford proposed the idea to Nasa at a special meeting on lunar science earlier this month.

(Via The Anomalist.)

I like how the idea is being touted as something radical when we should have been doing this all along as a matter of course. Instead, establishment SETI is just now thawing to the prospect after being forced to acknowledge that reality is impartial to its tidy equations and anthropomorphic biases.

And isn't it cute how Crawford dutifully dismisses the possibility of finding intact ET artifacts by citing a science fiction film?