In search of signs of extraterrestrial life

A study with the title on Galactic Sails was published on May 21, but it is beginning to be known as the galactic dump theory, there are many scientists who are looking for life outside the earth there is a whole scientific branch called eso-biology and finding life It is one of the fundamental objectives of most space missions.

One of the scientists who has stood out the most in this field has been Abraham Loeb of Harvard University, he is the promoter of the Galilean project that consists of the search for technological signatures of extraterrestrial civilizations the project is considered complementary to the already veteran SETI and in the sense that the Galilean project unlike SETI and what it seeks are physical objects; while the SETI set and what it does is look for electromagnetic signals such as radio emissions associated, of course, with extraterrestrial technological equipment.

Abraham Loeb develops in the study published a few days ago an approach that imagines space as an immense ocean where, over billions of years, various civilizations have ended up dumping the remains of their ships or their space structures, it is not so strange to imagine something similar, humans have sent ships to explore other planets and beyond such as Voyager I and II, but we are also launching rocket debris, drifting ships into space and we are filling Earth's orbit with garbage that Currently they are already a problem for satellite navigation and all that in just 65 years, but that is another matter.

Imagine how many remains can be produced by a technological civilization that takes tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years of space travel, in this approach Abraham Loeb analyzes a very specific remains, that of solar sails, which are like, for example, this one that you are seeing in the picture.

These solar sails use the light pressure of the photons to obtain momentum, they do not accelerate very quickly, but little by little they reach an enormous speed, they also have advantages such as that they do not need an engine or carry fuel, since they can use the light of any star .

Any technological civilization can discover the principle of a solar sail, in the same way that other different cultures independently discovered that wood rubbed and that boats could be made with it, so Abraham Loeb considers that it is very likely that solar sails they are a common form of space transportation for any civilization, they are also cheap to build and in case of breakdown or breakage they can be easily replaced, in fact it would be easier to throw away the broken one and change it for a new one that you are trying to repair.

Abraham Loeb then wonders what happens to the remains of the solar sails and here the interesting part begins because unlike other remains that are solid objects, for example the rest of a rocket, it would move just like a typical asteroid, a solar vega no matter how Whatever broken it is, the thrust of light continues to act on it and therefore it acts in a peculiar way, different from what a piece of metal would do, the remains of a rocket or a ship.

Specifically, these remains, these sails would move away from their original star at a faster speed, then pushed by the light emitted by the galaxy's disk of stars they can rise above the median plane of the galactic disk, the force of the radiation it would push the solar sheets away from the disk in the same way that the wind lifts a kite into the air by overcoming the earth's gravity.

The sheets would rise above the disk of the milky way to a height where they would be trapped by the gravitational potential of the dark matter halo, the calculation is that they remain at a height of a few thousand light years, creating a galactic dump area or if you want a solar sail graveyard.

All this would be a process of billions of years and considering that at that time various technological civilizations that had disappeared or evolved to other levels would have emerged in the milky way, we do not know right now.

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