Longevity is the key factor in the search for technosignatures

Abstract

It is well-known that the chances of success of SETI depend on the longevity of technological civilizations or, more broadly, on the duration of the signs of their existence, or technosignatures. Here, we re-examine this general tenet in more detail, and we show that its broader implications were not given the proper significance. In particular, an often overlooked aspect is that the duration of a technosignature is in principle almost entirely separable from the age of the civilization that produces it. We propose a classification scheme of technosignatures based on their duration and, using Monte Carlo simulations, we show that, given an initial generic distribution of Galactic technosignatures, only the ones with the longest duration are likely to be detected. This tells us, among other things, that looking for a large number of short-lived technosignatures is a weaker observational strategy than focusing the search on a few long-lived ones. It also suggests to abandon any anthropocentric bias in approaching the question of extraterrestrial intelligence. We finally give some ideas of possible pathways that can lead to the establishment of long-lived technosignatures.

arXiv commentAccepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal

References in corpus (23)

• Power laws, Pareto distributions and Zipf's law
• Prevalence of Earth-size planets orbiting Sun-like stars
• Understanding the Mass-Radius Relation for Sub-Neptunes: Radius as a Proxy for Composition
• The Galactic Habitable Zone and the Age Distribution of Complex Life in the Milky Way
• An Estimate of the Age Distribution of Terrestrial Planets in the Universe: Quantifying Metallicity as a Selection Effect
• The Ĝ Infrared Search for Extraterrestrial Civilizations with Large Energy Supplies. I. Background and Justification
• The Temporal Aspect of the Drake Equation and SETI
• Extragalactic SETI: The Tully-Fisher relation as a probe of Dysonian astroengineering in disk galaxies
• On The History and Future of Cosmic Planet Formation
• Terrestrial planets across space and time
• Relative Likelihood for Life as a Function of Cosmic Time
• The Nine Axes of Merit for Technosignature Searches
• Observational Signatures of Self-Destructive Civilisations
• Contact Inequality -- First Contact Will Likely Be With An Older Civilization
• Copernicanism and the Typicality in Time
• Signal coverage approach to the detection probability of hypothetical extraterrestrial emitters in the Milky Way
• NASA and the Search for Technosignatures: A Report from the NASA Technosignatures Workshop
• Advanced Aspects of the Galactic Habitability
• The Impact of the Temporal Distribution of Communicating Civilizations on their Detectability
• A novel SETI strategy targeting the solar focal regions of the most nearby stars
• Galactic exploration by directed Self-Replicating Probes, and its implications for the Fermi paradox
• Persistence of Technosignatures: A Comment on Lingam and Loeb
• Demography of galactic technosignatures

Cited by in corpus (12)

• The Case for Technosignatures: Why They May Be Abundant, Long-lived, Highly Detectable, and Unambiguous
• Disruption of a Planetary Nitrogen Cycle as Evidence of Extraterrestrial Agriculture
• Eta-Earth Revisited II: Deriving a Maximum Number of Earth-like Habitats in the Galactic Disk
• If Loud Aliens Explain Human Earliness, Quiet Aliens Are Also Rare
• Searching the SETI Ellipsoid with Gaia
• Mathematical encoding within multi-resonant planetary systems as SETI beacons
• Artificial Broadcasts as Galactic Populations: I. A Point Process Formalism for Extraterrestrial Intelligences and Their Broadcasts
• Inferring the rate of technosignatures from 60 yr of nondetection
• SETI in 2021
• Technosignatures longevity and Lindy's law
• Ground to Dust: Collisional Cascades and the Fate of Kardashev II Megaswarms
• Undetected past contacts with technological species: implications for technosignature science