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But it gets even more intriguing. Paul Davies of the Beyond Center at Arizona State University has proposed looking not for aliens but for footprints of alien technology, such as waste from their nuclear energy technology. And he has other ideas. “The one that most intrigues me is the possibility that the aliens may have engaged in some kind of biotechnology - if they had come to Earth and tinkered with terrestrial micro-organisms, or even made their own from scratch, the products of that could still be around.” In other words, if aliens came through our neck of the woods long before we were here to see them, they may have left deliberate clues tucked in the DNA of microbes that have faithfully copied the message for millions of years. Prof Davies reckons that, since we’re sequencing the DNA of life of all sorts anyway, we should keep an eye out for this kind of “message in a bottle”.
