In September 2011, an article by Lisa Grossman "Scour Earth for traces of intelligent aliens" was published on the electronic resource of the journal "New Scientist", which highlighted the views on the problem of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence by British physicist Paul Davis, now a professor at the University of Arizona
His research interests include cosmology, quantum field theory, astrobiology. Since 2005 Davis has been participating in the SETI project. Now he called for the search for traces of extraterrestrial civilizations not only in distant space, but also on the planet Earth and within the solar system.
The Search for Traces of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program focused primarily on listening to radio signals from space, among which they searched for possible messages from "brothers in mind". These studies, which have been going on for half a century, did not give the expected results, while the implementation of the project required huge financial costs. Paul Davis proposed alternative searches that would require a much lower investment. According to him, if millions of years ago the Earth was visited by aliens, then the latter could leave traces of their presence - both in the form of artifacts and industrial waste, places of mining or storage of radioactive waste. Similar technogenic traces of geological exploration activities on Earth,The moon and asteroids could have survived for very long periods of time and may well be detected by us, despite the processes of erosion and so on.
Of course, we are not talking about the stone slab-style artifacts from the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey". But the search for plutonium-244, a radioactive isotope that occurs naturally in small quantities and has a half-life of about 80 million years, makes sense. Areas with significant concentration may indicate the presence of traces of alien nuclear technology here.
Also Paul Davis suggested that in the event of a visit to Earth, technologically advanced aliens could well have left traces in our DNA. Much of the genetic code refers to areas that do not carry any biological function. These "useless" sections of DNA can also contain signs of their interference.
Various comments from other scientists followed on the proposals made by the British physicist, which were unusual for academic science. Microbiologist Steve Benner of the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Gainesville (Florida, USA) questioned the reliability of finding such extraterrestrial traces in non-functional DNA, believing that such input from the outside would disappear from the code rather quickly. Gary Ravkan, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, said that this would be a very atypical code that would still be clearly identifiable even after mutations.
Frank Drake, known as one of the pioneers of the search for extraterrestrial civilizations and the author of the "Drake equation" to determine the number of civilizations in our galaxy, spoke in support of the idea of searching for extraterrestrial artifacts not only in space, but also on Earth. Seth Shostak from the SETI Institute (California, USA) also agreed with this opinion, but stressed that this should not be a substitute for searching for traces of extraterrestrial civilizations outside our planet. David Deutsch, a physicist from the University of Oxford (UK), although he doubted the fruitfulness of such searches, but recognized the need for them.
Davis himself admits that his idea may seem rather "wild and bizarre", but it does not cost anything to comb the available databases on genomes - it will be inexpensive. Although the chances of finding an extraterrestrial code in DNA are extremely small, the very possibility of their discovery is of much greater importance.
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Finally, it should be said that the ideas of visiting our planet by representatives of extraterrestrial civilizations in the distant past are by no means new. In this case, "new" is far from forgotten "old". Suffice it to recall Erich von Daniken with his "Memories of the Future" - a classic in this topic. However, numerous authors of publications on paleovisitology and mysterious artifacts of antiquity mainly sin by the lack of a rigorous scientific approach to the problem, despite the fact that some of them have scientific degrees, but not in those areas in which they should be. It remains to be hoped that the topic of the possibility of paleovisites will nevertheless be considered at the proper level and will not be limited only to combing genomes. The list of various suspicious artifacts - possible evidence of high technology in the Earth's past - is still long.