7. Conclusion
The moon is an excellent place to store artifacts or
discard trash, both human and alien, but locating them
presents a challenge. It may be possible to narrow down
the search area through careful reasoning, but that
requires making assumptions about alien motives, technology
and psychology, which may be completely wrong.
Ideally, humans will look at high-resolution images of the
entire moon, searching for anything unusual. The LRO
Laboratory at Arizona State University currently employs
a small pool of students and faculty to search the NAC
images for interesting features, but the photographic data
is accumulating far faster than the students’ ability to
keep up. It would take a very long time at the current rate
to survey the entire lunar surface, so some form of
automation is needed. Automation, however, currently
requires assumptions about what an artifact will look like,
which brings us back to the problem of trying to guess an
alien agenda. In the near term the best strategy may be to
recruit large numbers of amateur enthusiasts, after the
fashion of the Galaxy Zoo project [22], to scrutinize the
NAC images by eye as they become publicly available.