As I’m sure you know (because you’ve been listening to the 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast)about the Kepler Mission. It’s is a space-based telescope that is searching for extra-solar planets.
It’s already found several mysterious objects, like super-hot planet-sized objects and super-light planets.
The odds are that it’s only a matter of time before it finds an Earth-like planet outside our solar system. Kepler needs to catch one in the process of transiting the face of a distant star (which makes the star dim minutely), and then it needs to catch it doing that again, which for a planet like the earth would obviously take a year or more.
It would be amazing to find more planets like our own, but what I haven’t heard anyone talk about is the likelihood of finding planetary-scale engineering.
I’m guessing that something like a series of planet-sized solar power satellites would show up right away. They would make the star’s light intensity vary at a high frequency without causing much of a gravitational wobble.
But would they recognize a ringworld? As the ribbon of a ringworld oscillated across the face of a star, it would look like the normal fluctuations of a variable star.
Not that there’s much point in me speculating. I’m sure that astronomy grad students around the world are secretly pouring over the data, hoping to be the first to see the evidence of near-godlike aliens.
