One of my pet lunacies is looking for ET artifacts in deep space. I'm very skeptical of SETI as it currently stands (high energy signals beamed at us is nonsense) and don't believe in UFOs. However to me, it seems reasonable to look for ET artifacts in Saturn's orbit.

A big problem with looking for old space junk is micrometeors. Micrometerors will eventually pound an old starship decelleration stage into unrecognizable scrap metal. This raises the question, which environment is more preservative? The surface of Mars or the vacuum of deep space. At first glance one might think that deep space was best. However the Martian atmosphere is thick enough to shield against micrometeors. The Martian surface is bone dry and the atmosphere is nonoxidizing. The Martian dust is erosive until it covers a surface object and then the dust acts as a preservative. Finally, Mars appears to be dead tectonically so an artifact would not get subducted into the Martian mantel. One can make the argument that the Martian surface is a good place to look for old ET artifacts (Shades of Cydonia!). The compelling counter arguments is: Why in the hell would ET waste a moment on Mars? When ET arrived in our system, its first task would be to do a general survey, discover that the Earth was the one interesting world in our system and then beam those results back to its home system. Then ET would go into von Neumann machine mode by travelling to the Saturn system and rebuild its starship as well as construct local exploration probes. Most of the local exploration probes would go to the Earth and perform an extensive survey. Some of those Earth probes may now be unrecognizable globs of carbon and corroded metal to found in coal seams. There's a possibility that ET sent one or two extra probes to Mars just for the sake of scientific completeness. There's a slight possibility that those probes are still recognizable as artifacts if they are observable on the Martian surface. Again IMHO the best hope of finding ET's hardware is in the Saturn system. That's were ET would dump its deceleration stages and build its self replicating factories that were ingesting Saturnian material.

Gary