Private Odysseus moon lander reveals which Earth ‘technosignatures’ aliens might see
Astrophysicist Jack Burns of the University of Colorado Boulder described the moment as the “dawn of radio astronomy from the moon.”
Human technology like cell phones and broadcast towers constantly radiate radio waves into space, and astronomers estimate this tell-tale signature of humanity has swept across 75 nearby star systems, signaling to any watchful alien civilization that Earth hosts a technologically advanced species. And, while scientists have listened to the incessant radio chatter from our planet for a long time, in late February, they heard it from the moon for the first time.
A small radio telescope onboard the Odysseus spacecraft, the first commercial vehicle that successfully landed on the moon on Feb. 22, recorded radio waves beamed from Earth for 1.5 hours. The experiment, named ROLSES, made its observations from Odysseus’ landing spot near the Malapert A crater, which sits roughly 185 miles (297 kilometers) away from the moon’s south pole.
Astrophysicist Jack Burns of the University of Colorado Boulder, who is the co-investigator of ROLSES, described the moment as the “dawn of radio astronomy from the moon.” By studying Earth as an exoplanet, astronomers hope to search for similar fingerprints coming from planets around other stars, which would be a potential sign of intelligent life.
Speaking on June 10 at the 244th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Wisconsin, Burns pulled up an image on screen in which tiny white dots appeared sprinkled over a jet-black background, mostly forming horizontal lines.”That’s the Earth,” he said.
The white specks are radio signals from transmitters on Earth as recorded by the ROLSES experiment’s four antennas. It is “a really good ‘frequency selfie’ of the Earth […] that’s unparalleled to date” in terms of looking at Earth in radio wavelengths, Burns added.
Related: Intuitive Machines’ private Odysseus moon lander has ‘permanently faded’ on lunar surface as historic mission ends
During its historic landing on Feb. 22, the 14-foot (4.3-meter) Odysseus spacecraft descended faster than planned and tipped over on its side, likely because it fractured one or two of its landing legs after striking a piece of lunar terrain, Tim Crain, Intuitive Machines co-founder and CTO, previously said. As a result of this unexpected orientation, the spacecraft’s antennas weren’t pointed back at Earth, reducing the rate at which data could be sent by a lot.
Perhaps due to these issues, the ROLSES instrument recorded data for a total of two hours instead of the eight days astronomers were hoping for, Burns said on Monday. The reduced time would affect the signal-to-noise ratio of the collected data, he added. It was not immediately clear whether the researchers would be able to decode the transmissions to determine the content of those radio waves.
The researchers also gathered a serendipitous 20 minutes of data when one of Odysseus’ antennas slightly overheated and popped out of its secure place on the lander. “So we took advantage of that, turned on our radio spectrometer, and we got some data,” said Burns.
After a week of operations on the moon, Odysseus went silent on Feb. 29 after sundown hit its landing site, which was expected given the spacecraft wasn’t designed to survive the cold lunar night. When sunlight once again shone on Odysseus’ solar panels on March 20, Intuitive Machines, the Houston-based company that built the spacecraft, listened for but failed to hear its wake-up signal. Three days later, the company declared “Odie has permanently faded after cementing its legacy into history as the first commercial lunar lander to land on the moon.”
Astronomers including Burns are now looking ahead to the launch of another small radio telescope that is expected to launch to the moon’s far side in 2026. The Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment-Night, or LuSEE-Night for short, is being designed to detect radio waves from 13.4 billion years ago, a mysterious era when the universe and its first stars and galaxies were cloaked in a primordial fog of hydrogen. Astronomers refer to this epoch as the cosmic Dark Ages, which the James Webb Space Telescope has only recently begun probing.
In Space.com
AI may be to blame for our failure to make contact with alien civilizations
The rise of AI might explain why the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has yet to detect the signatures of advanced technical civilizations elsewhere in the galaxy.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has progressed at an astounding pace over the last few years. Some scientists are now looking towards the development of artificial superintelligence (ASI) — a form of AI that would not only surpass human intelligence but would not be bound by the learning speeds of humans.
But what if this milestone isn’t just a remarkable achievement? What if it also represents a formidable bottleneck in the development of all civilizations, one so challenging that it thwarts their long-term survival?
This idea is at the heart of a research paper I recently published in Acta Astronautica. Could AI be the universe’s “great filter” – a threshold so hard to overcome that it prevents most life from evolving into space-faring civilizations?
This is a concept that might explain why the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has yet to detect the signatures of advanced technical civilizations elsewhere in the galaxy.
The great filter hypothesis is ultimately a proposed solution to the Fermi Paradox. This questions why, in a universe vast and ancient enough to host billions of potentially habitable planets, we have not detected any signs of alien civilizations. The hypothesis suggests there are insurmountable hurdles in the evolutionary timeline of civilizations that prevent them from developing into space-faring entities.
I believe the emergence of ASI could be such a filter. AI’s rapid advancement, potentially leading to ASI, may intersect with a critical phase in a civilization’s development – the transition from a single-planet species to a multiplanetary one.
This is where many civilizations could falter, with AI making much more rapid progress than our ability either to control it or sustainably explore and populate our Solar System.
The challenge with AI, and specifically ASI, lies in its autonomous, self-amplifying and improving nature. It possesses the potential to enhance its own capabilities at a speed that outpaces our own evolutionary timelines without AI.
The potential for something to go badly wrong is enormous, leading to the downfall of both biological and AI civilizations before they ever get the chance to become multiplanetary. For example, if nations increasingly rely on and cede power to autonomous AI systems that compete against each other, military capabilities could be used to kill and destroy on an unprecedented scale. This could potentially lead to the destruction of our entire civilization, including the AI systems themselves.
In this scenario, I estimate the typical longevity of a technological civilization might be less than 100 years. That’s roughly the time between being able to receive and broadcast signals between the stars (1960), and the estimated emergence of ASI (2040) on Earth. This is alarmingly short when set against the cosmic timescale of billions of years.
This estimate, when plugged into optimistic versions of the Drake equation – which attempts to estimate the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way – suggests that, at any given time, there are only a handful of intelligent civilizations out there. Moreover, like us, their relatively modest technological activities could make them quite challenging to detect.
Wake-up call
This research is not simply a cautionary tale of potential doom. It serves as a wake-up call for humanity to establish robust regulatory frameworks to guide the development of AI, including military systems.
This is not just about preventing the malevolent use of AI on Earth; it’s also about ensuring the evolution of AI aligns with the long-term survival of our species. It suggests we need to put more resources into becoming a multiplanetary society as soon as possible – a goal that has lain dormant since the heady days of the Apollo project, but has lately been reignited by advances made by private companies.
As the historian Yuval Noah Harari noted, nothing in history has prepared us for the impact of introducing non-conscious, super-intelligent entities to our planet. Recently, the implications of autonomous AI decision-making have led to calls from prominent leaders in the field for a moratorium on the development of AI, until a responsible form of control and regulation can be introduced.
But even if every country agreed to abide by strict rules and regulation, rogue organizations will be difficult to rein in.
The integration of autonomous AI in military defense systems has to be an area of particular concern. There is already evidence that humans will voluntarily relinquish significant power to increasingly capable systems, because they can carry out useful tasks much more rapidly and effectively without human intervention. Governments are therefore reluctant to regulate in this area given the strategic advantages AI offers, as has been recently and devastatingly demonstrated in Gaza.
This means we already edge dangerously close to a precipice where autonomous weapons operate beyond ethical boundaries and sidestep international law. In such a world, surrendering power to AI systems in order to gain a tactical advantage could inadvertently set off a chain of rapidly escalating, highly destructive events. In the blink of an eye, the collective intelligence of our planet could be obliterated.
Humanity is at a crucial point in its technological trajectory. Our actions now could determine whether we become an enduring interstellar civilization, or succumb to the challenges posed by our own creations.
Using SETI as a lens through which we can examine our future development adds a new dimension to the discussion on the future of AI. It is up to all of us to ensure that when we reach for the stars, we do so not as a cautionary tale for other civilizations, but as a beacon of hope – a species that learned to thrive alongside AI.
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