Finding Aliens using Unnatural Shapes

We can find a range of different shapes in Nature:

• The straight lines of a fissure in slate, a hanging liana or spider's web between two points
• The spheres produced by gravity like a star or planet, or the smoothed pebbles from centuries of erosion underwater
• The cubes of pyrite crystals
• The spirals of galaxies and seashells
• The hexagons of beehives

I would argue that in Nature we see two trends:

• Larger structures are less regular (object complexity increases)
• Larger structures have fewer straight Vertices (sides) and less defined Nodes (angles) between them

This might be because regardless of whether the object was produced physically, chemically or biologically, the situation would need to be one of “perfect” uniformity without external disturbance to achieve perfectly straight edges and repeating angles.

For example imagine the structure is a crystal (i.e. chemical in nature). Crystals can grow in various shapes with exceptionally straight edges and defined angles, but even beyond a few centimetres most of their growth will be affected by other factors like their own weight, by changes in temperature and solute concentration, by impurities, by changing currents, and by competing crystal growth from other seeds. The chance of truly massive single crystals are low. Most of the “large” crystals we see in museums and caves are typically agglomerations of many smaller crystals that are stuck together and are not regular in the shape to the same degree.

If the structure is biological, most vertices are curved in some way (e.g. the cuboid vascular tissues of some plants and the hexagons of beehives have rounded corners). This might have a structural or molecular origin. If soft, squidgy cells are the basic repeating unit of any living structure, we can hypothesise that creating close to perfect points and straight sides would be difficult. A brick wall would be difficult to build in a rectangle if the constituent bricks were round or soft after all.

Where am I going with this?

While Nature has (in my opinion) a small likelihood of ever producing truly large, regular structures… humans do it all the time deliberately:

• Straight-edged skyscrapers
• Rectangular window panes of glass
• The steel beams that form the core of buildings
• The arrow-straight roads across flat terrain
• The triangles of roofs
• The tubes of under-sea cables
• The cuboid of a cabinet
• The round platter of a satellite dish

So, if other intelligent lifeforms have started building things too, could finding regular shapes with sharp angles, sides and corners at larger scales be a good indicator of their existence?

If there were some spectral way of detecting large squares, cubes, triangles, hexagons etc etc… would it help us scan the galaxy for aliens?