![]() ![]() But the asteroid belt is a better hiding place. We’re pretty confident now that there are no such probes on the moon, but there could be some on the recently-discovered moonlets which orbit the earth, and the Chinese are preparing a mission to investigate one. This is also the core idea in Arthur C Clarke’s short story “The Sentinel”, which Clarke and Stanley Kubrick developed into the film “2001”. These probes are designed to watch for new intelligences, and keep watching for millions of years. In his novel “Existence”, he posits the idea that intelligent aliens have sent out robotic probes, which arrive in a new solar system, replicate themselves, and send further probes to the next few systems, and so on. When we do get out into the asteroid belt, Brin thinks we might encounter mechanical probes, either dormant or defunct, sent long ago by distant aliens to observe us. It is handily outside the earth’s gravity well, so there will be cities on the moon eventually, but for now, the wealth is in the asteroids, and the most technologically advanced countries should pursue that challenge instead. ![]() In contrast, there are few resources on the moon, apart from some ice at the poles. Leaving symbolic lunar footprint stunts to younger space programs, a consortium of NASA, Japan and Europe should go instead to the asteroids, he says, where robots can mine huge reserves of valuable metals. The moon is a tourist sandbox, and Brin has argued that the Artemis programme, in which NASA goes back to the moon, chasing symbolic footprints on a plain of poisonous useless dust, is a mistake. Overall, Brin is pretty confident that we haven’t encountered intelligent aliens here on earth, but he thinks we might do when we get a little farther out - when we start mining asteroids.
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