A team of scientists dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) published a study in the journal "International Journal of Astrobiology" proposing that the search for microscopic traces in lunar soil could help answer one of the great questions for Humanity: whether we are alone in the universe.
The study was led by Lewis Pinault, a scientist affiliated with the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, and a researcher at Birkbeck College, University of London. Pinault told the New York Times that it would not be an absurd hypothesis to imagine that particles from an extraterrestrial technological civilization were present on the Moon in certain quantities.
The team demonstrated how alien infrastructures could weather and erode, transforming into tiny particles, and modeled how these particles would behave over time. The Moon, due to its lack of dense atmosphere and active tectonics, would preserve these traces for billions of years, unlike Earth, where such evidence would be rapidly destroyed.
