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Looking for Life in Light

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the shine-on dept.

Gearoid_Murphy writes "Earth-like planets around distant stars may be too far away to be reached by spacecraft but scientists could still investigate whether they harbour life. Telescope technologies are being developed that will probe the very faint light from these objects for tell-tale signs of biology. These are the same "life markers" known to be present in light reflected off the Earth - so-called "earthshine"."

3 of 140 comments (clear)

  1. Re:By the sound of it, they will be using optics by Poltras · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Probably will look at the shadow of the planet. What I am wondering though, is that if a planet is at, say, 700 light-years from here, and we're seeing a "civilization", or just plain life at least, then that life will be from 700 years before. Now with what we've been through in the last 100 years, put that a 10000 lightyears away and you have a heck of an evolution...

    PS: funny part is, if they see our earthshine from the same distance, we humans wouldn't even exist. Talk about being stealthy :)

    --
    Of Code And Men
  2. Re:What's the point? by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You're right, of course. We shouldn't be wasting our time with this head-in-the-clouds nonsense. Say, what's the latest news about Britney Spears' baby?

    --
    The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
  3. Re:Isn't this called SETI? by Urkki · · Score: 3, Insightful

    SETI has that pesky 'I' there, meaning intelligence. It's looking for signs of radio communications, based on assumption that only intelligent beings might communicate with radio. Though if a non-intelligent life communicating with radio was found, I don't think anybody would be majorly disappointed ;-).

    TFA is talking about finding planets that have *any* life that can significantly change the atmosphere of a planet. Earth could have been discovered like this probably at least since we've had O2 (regular oxygen gas) and O3 (ozone) in our atmosphere, starting from about 2 billion years (*) ago. Contrast this time with the time we've used radio communications, less than 100 years.

    (*) reference:
    http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange1/cu rrent/lectures/first_billion_years/first_billion_y ears.html