Great SETI Paper

The present approach is similar to the one favored by Dyson (2003), whosuggests searching for life at distant objects of the Solar System (and otherplanetary systems). Although Dyson only considers primitive life, this can beeasily generalized to life of higher level of complexity and even intelligence.8In his other writings, Dyson has suggested supercivilizations of various sortswhose activities can be detected even if they are not actively engaged in aneffort to contact and communicate with other societies; for an early reviewof such ideas, see Lemarchand (1995). In our view, the migration hypothesiscan solve Fermi?s paradox, since the truly advanced societies, i.e. those whosurvive the bottleneck presented by the threat of self-destruction throughwarfare or accident will tend to be located at the outskirts of the Milky Way,outside of the main thrust of SETI projects so far. The very same traits makingATCs capable of migrating and utilizing resources with high efficiency(compactness, high integration, etc.) will tend to make them systematicallyhard to detect from afar. This is in diametrical opposition to views of manyearly SETI researchers?recently brought to a sort of the logical extreme byWeinberger and Hartl (2002)?that ATCs will indulge in extravagant spendingin order to achieve interstellar communication, even if only nominal. Thesame applies mutatis mutandis to the large-scale interstellar travel to diversetargets; the nature of the postbiological megatrajectory is not likely to includeany gain from the scattering of pieces of an ATC all over the Galaxy.9One of the SETI pioneers, Benjamin Zuckerman proposed in 1985 that stellarevolution is an important motivation for civilizations to undertake interstellarmigrations (Zuckerman 1985). Although arguments presented in that studyseem outdated in many respects, it is significant that the mass migrationidea has been presented even in the context of classical SETI studies, biologicalevolution and pre-digital perspective. It seems implausible that anybut the most extreme conservative societies would opt to wait to be forcedto migration by slow and easily predictable process like their domicile starleaving the Main Sequence.
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf/0506/0506110.pdf