Prior Indigenous Technological Species

Abstract

One of the primary open questions of astrobiology is whether there is extant or extinct life elsewhere the Solar System. Implicit in much of this work is that we are looking for microbial or, at best, unintelligent life, even though technological artifacts might be much easier to find. SETI work on searches for alien artifacts in the Solar System typically presumes that such artifacts would be of extrasolar origin, even though life is known to have existed in the Solar System, on Earth, for eons. But if a prior technological, perhaps spacefaring, species ever arose in the Solar System, it might have produced artifacts or other technosignatures that have survived to present day, meaning Solar System artifact SETI provides a potential path to resolving astrobiology's question. Here, I discuss the origins and possible locations for technosignatures of such a $prior$ $indigenous$ $technological$ $species$, which might have arisen on ancient Earth or another body, such as a pre-greenhouse Venus or a wet Mars. In the case of Venus, the arrival of its global greenhouse and potential resurfacing might have erased all evidence of its existence on the Venusian surface. In the case of Earth, erosion and, ultimately, plate tectonics may have erased most such evidence if the species lived Gyr ago. Remaining indigenous technosignatures might be expected to be extremely old, limiting the places they might still be found to beneath the surfaces of Mars and the Moon, or in the outer Solar System.

11pp, no figures. Accepted for publication in the International Journal of Astrobiology. v2: Added some important references

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Cited by in corpus (13)

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• Relative Likelihood of Success in the Searches for Primitive versus Intelligent Extraterrestrial Life
• Identifying Interstellar Objects Trapped in the Solar System through Their Orbital Parameters
• The Fermi Paradox and the Aurora Effect: Exo-civilization Settlement, Expansion and Steady States
• Implications of Captured Interstellar Objects for Panspermia and Extraterrestrial Life
• Propulsion of Spacecrafts to Relativistic Speeds Using Natural Astrophysical Sources
• Contact Inequality -- First Contact Will Likely Be With An Older Civilization
• Strategies and Advice for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
• Interstellar communication network. I. Overview and assumptions
• A Search for Optical Laser Emission from Proxima Centauri
• Artificial Broadcasts as Galactic Populations: I. A Point Process Formalism for Extraterrestrial Intelligences and Their Broadcasts
• One of Everything: The Breakthrough Listen Exotica Catalog