In “Scour Earth for traces of intelligent aliens” (New Scientist, 07 September 2011) Lisa Grossman reports,
If smart aliens exist, they may have visited Earth millions of years ago – and left signs of their technological prowess that should be cheap and easy for us to detect.
Addressing the fact that 50 years of SETI searches have produced nothing, Paul Davies duggets,
scouring our own planet, even our cells, on the off-chance that aliens visited and did what amounts to scrawling “We were here” on the walls. “We can answer the question ‘Are we alone?’ without picking up messages,” he says. “We may see indirect evidence of alien technology based on the footprint it leaves.”
We should also look for manufactured rocks, space alien mines, alien nuclear waste dumps, … and junk DNA. Huh?
Aliens may even have left deliberate messages in our DNA, Davies says. Most DNA includes long sequences that seem to serve no biological function. Aliens may have embedded code in this “junk DNA” – a sequence of prime numbers as in the movie Contact, say – to signal their existence to us.
But there is hardly any junk DNA. Oh wait, there are no aliens around here either.
University of Colorado biologist Norman Pace calls the article is “mainly bullshit.” Can’t think why.
Anti-science is everywhere now. Especially in science. That’s why its an election issue.