Dark Alien Technology

(Image credit: AI/Gemini)When dozens of postdocs at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian were asked recently: “What do you want to happen first: (i) Find extraterrestrial life or (ii) Solve dark matter?”, about 90% of them selected the option: (i) Find extraterrestrial life.As soon as I heard about the poll results today, I wondered whether the two questions might be linked and answered at the same time. Below I offer a scenario for how this might happen.***Data on the dynamics of luminous matter inside galaxies and throughout the Universe at large reveals a strong gravitational influence of invisible matter. The nature of this dark matter is unknown because it does not emit or scatter light. In recent decades, laboratories around the world invested billions of dollars in searching for the possible imprints of dark matter on detectors made of ordinary matter. So far, these searches led to stringent upper limits on the interaction of dark matter with ordinary matter, except for one nuclear-recoil event recorded by the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) Dark Matter Experiment on June 16, 2023, during an analysis announced in September 2026.To accommodate all cosmological constraints, the background medium of dark matter particles must be cold, namely composed of particles with negligible random velocities before they cluster to make gravitationally-bound systems like our own Milky-Way galaxy.Theoretical models of cold dark matter predict density cusps at the centers of galaxies. However, many observations indicate constant-density cores in galactic nuclei, in contradiction with these expectations. One way to resolve the cusp-core problem is to assume that dark matter particles interact strongly with one another despite their weak interaction with the ordinary matter that we find on Earth. Given data on the cores of low-mass galaxies, this “self-interacting dark matter” model appeals to many cosmologists (as reviewed here).But suppose we take this model to its logical limi