Extrasolar asteroid mining as forensic evidence for extraterrestrial intelligence

Abstract

The development of civilizations such as ours into spacefaring, multi-planet entities requires significant raw materials to construct vehicles and habitats. Interplanetary debris, including asteroids and comets, may provide such a source of raw materials. In this article, we present the hypothesis that extraterrestrial intelligences (ETIs) engaged in asteroid mining may be detectable from Earth. Considering the detected disc of debris around Vega as a template, we explore the observational signatures of targeted asteroid mining (TAM), such as unexplained deficits in chemical species, changes in the size distribution of debris and other thermal signatures that may be detectable in the spectral energy distribution (SED) of a debris disc. We find that individual observational signatures of asteroid mining can be explained by natural phenomena, and as such they cannot provide conclusive detections of ETIs. But, it may be the case that several signatures appearing in the same system will prove harder to model without extraterrestrial involvement. Therefore, signatures of TAM are not detections of ETI in their own right, but as part of 'piggy-back' studies carried out in tandem with conventional debris disc research, they could provide a means of identifying unusual candidate systems for further study using other search for extra terrestrial intelligence (SETI) techniques.

The Ĝ Infrared Search for Extraterrestrial Civilizations With Large Energy Supplies. I. Background and Justification

“…Other ambitious engineering projects are theoretically detectable (Carrigan 2012), including artificially increasing stellar lifetimes by manipulating stellar rotation, internal pressures, and/or depositing hydrogen fuel (possibly producing blue straggler stars), terraforming planets or otherwise altering a planet's atmospheric composition with known byproducts of industrial and otherwise intelligent activity. Forgan & Elvis (2011) explored how ETI asteroid tampering could be observable in the SEDs of debris discs, and showed how such engineering projects in progress could be identifiable by anomalous chemical abundances of a mined debris disc, the thermal signature produced by waste dust, or the debris distribution itself as a dynamical signature of ETI intervention.…”

SAFARI: Searching Asteroids for Activity Revealing Indicators

“…The recent discovery of interstellar asteroid 'Oumuamua (Bacci et al 2017b) intensifies interest in understanding our own indigenous asteroid population in order to better understand and characterize ejectoids we encounter in the future, an estimated decadal occurrence (Trilling et al 2017). There has also long been an interest mining asteroids for their metals, and water could prove an invaluable resource providing, for example: energy, rocket fuel, breathable oxygen, and sustenance for plant and animal life (O'Leary 1977;Dickson 1978;Kargel 1994;Forgan & Elvis 2011;Hasnain et al 2012;Lewicki et al 2013;Andrews et al 2015).…”

Interstellar Communication Network. I. Overview and Assumptions

“…The postulation of alien probes inside the solar system is interesting, but more is required to narrow down the most likely locations. Generic "Lurkers" have been proposed to be located on nearby co-orbital objects (Steel 1995(Steel , 1998Benford 2019) for surveillance, near the Earthmoon Lagrangian points (Freitas & Valdes 1980;Valdes & Freitas 1983), in geocentric, selenocentric, Earth-Moon libration, and Earth-Moon halo orbits (Freitas 1983), in a tight orbit around the Sun (Gertz 2018), in the asteroid belt (Papagiannis 1978;Forgan & Elvis 2011), the Kuiper belt (Loeb & Turner 2012), on the surface of the moon (Davies & Wagner 2013;Wagner et al 2017), on Earth (Davies 2012) or anywhere in the solar system (Gertz 2016a(Gertz , 2017.…”