Concepts for future missions to search for technosignatures

Socas‐Navarro, H.; Haqq-Misra, Jacob; Wright, Jason T.; Kopparapu, R.; Benford, James; Davis, Ross

doi:10.1016/j.actaastro.2021.02.029

Cited by 19 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 57 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…We can exclude scenarios in which all G-dwarf stars would have been settled by now, but the possibility remains open that a Galactic Club exists across all K-dwarf or M-dwarf stars. The search for technosignatures in low-mass systems provides one way to constrain the presence of such a Galactic Club (e.g., Lingam & Loeb 2021;Socas-Navarro et al 2021;Haqq-Misra et al 2022;Wright et al 2022). Existing searches to-date have placed some limits on radio transmissions (e.g., Harp et al 2016;Enriquez et al 2017;Price et al 2020;Zhang et al 2020) and optical signals (e.g., Howard et al 2007;Tellis & Marcy 2015;Schuetz et al 2016) that might be associated with technological activity, but such limits can only weakly constrain the Galactic Club hypothesis.…”

Section: The K-dwarf Galactic Clubmentioning

confidence: 99%

Galactic Settlement of Low-mass Stars as a Resolution to the Fermi Paradox

Haqq-Misra¹,

Fauchez²

2022

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

An expanding civilization could spread rapidly through the Galaxy, so the absence of extraterrestrial settlement in the solar system implies that such expansionist civilizations do not exist. This argument, often referred to as the Fermi paradox, typically assumes that expansion would proceed uniformly through the Galaxy, but not all stellar types may be equally useful for a long-lived civilization. We suggest that low-mass stars, and K-dwarf stars in particular, would be ideal migration locations for civilizations that originate in a G-dwarf system. We use a modified form of the Drake equation to show that expansion across all low-mass stars could be accomplished in 2 Gyr, which includes waiting time between expansion waves to allow for a close approach to a suitable destination star. This would require interstellar travel capabilities of no more than ∼0.3 lt-yr to settle all M-dwarfs and ∼2 lt-yr to settle all K-dwarfs. Even more rapid expansion could occur within 2 Myr, with travel requirements of ∼10 lt-yr to settle all M-dwarfs and ∼50 lt-yr to settle all K-dwarfs. The search for technosignatures in exoplanetary systems can help to place constraints on the presence of such a “low-mass Galactic Club” in the Galaxy today.

show abstract

Section: The K-dwarf Galactic Clubmentioning

confidence: 99%

Galactic Settlement of Low-mass Stars as a Resolution to the Fermi Paradox

Haqq-Misra¹,

Fauchez²

2022

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…These are projects are attempting to look for signs of intelligent life capable of producing 'technosignatures', where life has evolved to a level that can produce signs of technical capability, such as atmospheric industrial pollution, orbiting megastructures, artificial radio signals, like those produced on Earth [19,20].…”

Section: Higher Life-forms?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Microbes and Space Travel – Hope and Hazards

2021

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…The objective of this paper is to encourage a broader range of astronomers to consider the relevance of technosignatures to their research by serving as a resource that describes the detectability of various nonradio technosignatures with current and future missions. The second research agenda objective was to develop mission concepts that are optimized for technosignature science and was explored by Socas-Navarro et al [64], which included overview of future mission possibilities as well as a metric for ranking the relative detectability of technosignatures. The third research agenda objective recognized that the first detection of a technosignature might be an anomalous finding in a field other than astrobiology, which led Singam et al [65] to develop a conceptual framework for evaluating "noncanonical astrophysical phenomena" as potential technosignatures.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Searching for technosignatures in exoplanetary systems with current and future missions

Haqq-Misra,

Schwieterman,

Socas-Navarro

et al. 2022

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Technosignatures refer to observational manifestations of technology that could be detected through astronomical means. Most previous searches for technosignatures have focused on searches for radio signals, but many current and future observing facilities could also constrain the prevalence of some non-radio technosignatures. This search could thus benefit from broader participation by the astronomical community, as contributions to technosignature science can also take the form of negative results that provide statistically meaningful quantitative upper limits on the presence of a signal. This paper provides a synthesis of the recommendations of the 2020 TechnoClimes workshop, which was an online event intended to develop a research agenda to prioritize and guide future theoretical and observational studies technosignatures. The paper provides a high-level overview of the use of current and future missions to detect exoplanetary technosignatures at ultraviolet, optical, or infrared wavelengths, which specifically focuses on the detectability of atmospheric technosignatures, artificial surface modifications, optical beacons, space engineering and megastructures, and interstellar flight. This overview does not derive any new quantitative detection limits but is intended to provide additional science justification for the use of current and planned observing facilities as well as to inspire astronomers conducting such observations to consider the relevance of their ongoing observations to technosignature science. This synthesis also identifies possible technology gaps with the ability of current and planned missions to search for technosignatures, which suggests the need to consider technosignature science cases in the design of future mission concepts.

show abstract

Concepts for future missions to search for technosignatures

Cited by 19 publications

References 57 publications

Galactic Settlement of Low-mass Stars as a Resolution to the Fermi Paradox

Galactic Settlement of Low-mass Stars as a Resolution to the Fermi Paradox

Microbes and Space Travel – Hope and Hazards

Searching for technosignatures in exoplanetary systems with current and future missions

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About