The Search For Technosignatures: A Review Of Possibilities

This paper aims to review the diverse range of technosignatures that have been proposed in the literature.

We organize the review by scales, starting carefully from Earth, then zooming out to Earth’s orbit, the solar system, including the Moon, the Earth-Moon Lagrange points, the inner solar system, the asteroid belt, interstellar objects, the outer solar system, the Kuiper belt, the solar gravitational lens region, and the Oort cloud. We then introduce the Kardashev and Barrow scale before exploring exoplanetary technosignatures, from surface, atmospheric to orbital sources.

We next consider stellar technosignatures that may involve massive energy utilization, stellar modification or stellar pollution, and end with a section about compact objects. We then review attempts to detect interstellar communication, and discuss many dimensions of the search space from first principles.

Then we consider interstellar travel technosignatures, and end with galactic, extragalactic and universal signatures. We end with a discussion about synergies between biosignatures and technosignatures searches, anomaly detection, multimodal strategies, instruments for detecting technosignatures, how to evaluate and prioritize the search, as well as epistemological issues.

Clément Vidal, Benji L. Fields, Damian R. Sowinski, Mark Elowitz, Stuart Bartlett, Richard J. Terrile, Alex Ellery, Daliah Bibas, Armando M. Mastrogiovanni, Niklas Döbler, Manika Singla, Julia DeMarines, Theresa Fisher, Yuri Uno, Jake D. Turner, Evan L. Sneed, Advait Huggahalli, Megan Grace Li, Zhuofu (Chester)Li, Macy Huston, Ramiro Saide

Comments: 118 pages, paper started as a collective workshop at the Penn State SETI Symposium (PSETI 2023)
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP); Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM); Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR)
Cite as: arXiv:2605.21093 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2605.21093v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.21093
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From: Clément Vidal
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.21093

Astrobiology,