Voluntary and Involuntary Technosignatures: Which Are to Be Encountered First

Numerous methods have been tried and many more are currently being attempted to discover technosignatures of intelligent civilizations. One thing is for sure: an existing technosignature would modify its environment in detectable ways. The current study has investigated all possible voluntary and involuntary technosignatures, ranging from beacons to Dyson megastructures and from self-replicating probes to the still hypothetical stellar engines, in order to determine the extent to which these technosignatures would reveal themselves within a specified finite sphere 500 light years across, corresponding to nearly half the average thickness of our Galaxy. We then estimated the probabilities of detection of such technosignatures based on the regions, or domains, they would produce and investigated whether or not a correlation exists with the position of civilizations on the Kardashev scale. The study further explored which ones of the voluntary and involuntary technosignatures have higher detection probabilities.