Scientists Think They May Know How to Track Alien Warp Drives

Cosmic travel has long been on the minds of many scientists for decades. So much so, it’s been something science-fiction works tackle head-on, from Star Wars‘ lightspeed to Final Space‘s lightfolding. While researchers don’t have a way for us to actually travel at the speed of light, a new study reveals a team thinks we may know how to detect if extraterrestrial life amongst the cosmos has access to the technology.

In a new study from a team at the Advanced Propulsion Laboratory at Applied Physics, it’s suggested the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) should be able to detect the existence of gravitational waves created by alien ships that produce space-time ripples.

“We show that the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) is a powerful instrument in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI),” the team writes in its study. “LIGO’s ability to detect gravitational waves (GWs) from astrophysical sources, such as binary black hole mergers, also provides the potential to detect extraterrestrial mega-technology, such as Rapid And/orMassive Accelerating spacecraft (RAMAcraft).”

Traditionally, LIGO observes items such as planets, neutron stars, or even black holes as the produce gravitational waves. LIGO first detected gravitational waves in 2015, using two observatories based in the United States. Luckily for this team, NASA’s actively working on its own gravitational wave observatory, one it hopes to launch into space sometime in the next decade.

“LISA consists of three spacecraft that are separated by millions of miles and trailing tens of millions of miles, more than one hundred times the distance to the Moon, behind the Earth as we orbit the Sun,” the agency says of its Laser Interferometer Space Antenna. “These three spacecraft relay laser beams back and forth between the different spacecraft and the signals are combined to search for gravitational wave signatures that come from distortions of spacetime. We need a giant detector bigger than the size of Earth to catch gravitational waves from orbiting black holes millions of times more massive than our sun. NASA is a major collaborator in the European Space Agency (ESA)-led mission, which is scheduled to launch in the early 2030s and we are getting ready for it now!”

Between LIGO and LISA, who knows what evidence of alien life researchers may find!

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