Scenarios which may lead to the rise of an asteroid-based technical civilisation

If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens ... WHERE IS EVERYBODY?

“…A shell world is formed by enclosing an airless, sterile body by a shell of material to create a cozy home for life. 145 Pg 106 a better analogy for colonization Kecskes (1998Kecskes ( , 2002) outlines a possible "trajectory" for the development of technical civilizations: they move from being planet dwellers to asteroid dwellers to interstellar travelers to interstellar space dwellers. In this picture we don't meet extraterrestrials because our habitats are different.…”

On the likelihood of non-terrestrial artifacts in the Solar System

“…An even more omnipotent extraterrestrial civilization might engineer a virtual planetarium that forces us to observe an empty universe [23], which would give us almost no chance at discovering their presence until they choose to reveal themselves to us. More mundane versions of the zoo hypothesis simply invoke the vastness of space to suggest that extraterrestrials or extraterrestrial technology could be hiding in the asteroid belt [25,26,27,28] or other places in the Solar System [29,30,31] without us noticing. This range of possibilities for the zoo hypothesis can be rather confusing for SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) researchers because some of these hypotheses are testable whereas others are not.…”

“…Extraterrestrial visitors to the Solar System could also leave signatures other than technological artifacts. For example, a civilization could establish residence in the asteroid belt and take advantage of the abundance of mineral resources [25,26,27,28]. Evidence of this type of visitation on asteroids or other rocky bodies could be inferred from the discovery of non-terrestrial mining technology or industrial byproducts such as nuclear waste.…”

Would contact with extraterrestrials benefit or harm humanity? A scenario analysis

“…ETI could have the capability of hiding from us given the likelihood of their superior technology, and there are many ways that ETI could remain undetected by us if it chooses to do so. The simplest approach would be to hide among the asteroids and observe us at a distance [51][52][53][54]. In this case, such ETI will cease to be invisible to us when we have searched enough of the asteroid belt to detect signs of their presence, such as mining on asteroids [55][56][57], excess infrared radiation from spacecraft [7,58], or intelligent conversational space probes [59].…”