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Brainstorming Clever Ways To Detect Alien Civilizations
Phoghat writes "In what is starting to become a familiar theme, researchers have speculated on what types of observational data from distant planetary systems might indicate the presence of an alien civilization. Potential indicators of the presence of an alien civilization might include: atmospheric pollutants, like chlorofluorocarbons – which, unlike methane or molecular oxygen, are clearly manufactured rather than just biogenically produced; propulsion signatures – like how the Vulcans detected humanity in Star Trek: First Contact; evidence of stellar engineering – where a star's lifetime is artificially extended to maintain the habitable zone of its planetary system; or debris created from asteroid mining."
Turn off the detectors.. That'll stop 'em.. er. I mean.. ??
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
It's funny that most of the methods mentioned in the summary wouldn't detect us.
Either in amplitude or PCM. Neutrinos interact with matter even less than Electromagnetic waves.
They are a bitch to generate (take an awfull LOT of energy), but that is the problem of the alien civilization trying to comunicate, not ours, at least for the time being.
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
Potential indicators of the presence of an alien civilization might include: atmospheric pollutants, like chlorofluorocarbons â" which, unlike methane or molecular oxygen, are clearly manufactured rather than just biogenically produced
Clearly? Maybe here on earth. Who knows what natural processes exist elsewhere.
The detection of an atomic bomb throws off a unique signature not found in nature. It's like a power beacon of energy that's a universal sign of intelligence. The kind of signature not normally found in nature. Detect those, and you've got your alien race.
Life is not for the lazy.
would be, IMHO, a large black rectangular monolith in orbit against one of the outer planets...
What I've also wondered is how big of an antenna would we need to detect a communication from a near star, say 50ly. And how much power would it take to send a message that far?
If we can't even see planets, how can SETI expect to receive a transmission from one?
I've asked some astronomy majors about this and received only blank stares. Do they teach this kind of thing in astronomy? What are the calculations?
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
I think polution is what you want to look for. If they don't have that then you probably don't want to talk to them anyway because they: 1- are too primitive, have no tech- nothing to trade or steal. 2- are envioro-nazis who will hate us for destroying our enviornment.
You just need to give it more fuel to burn and keep it's density.
How about instead of just trying to detect other civilizations that exist along side us, also trying to detect ones that came long before in the previous Universe. If the Universe is cyclic and there was another universe before our "big bang", one thing we could do is see if the particles around us have some kind of signature to them that would be unexpected. It may not be possible right now for us to make such signatures, but perhaps a previous civilization built large devices close to the end of the previous universe that could explode once most of the matter of the Universe was closer together and give many particles such a signature.
The only thing is, how would you determine if something has a signature to it if you have no basis for comparison. Well I guess you could assume that not all the particles had been hit so the test could be to compare some sub atomic particles of one kind with ones of the same kind, but in a different region of space.
I wrote an article about this 8 years ago. Crazy idea? Perhaps. Sometimes crazy ideas help others think in new ways.
They should watch Star Trek et. al. more.
Or maybe they did just that too much already.
all produced from OUR technology and civilization which were entirely shaped by OUR cultural biases.
had our cultural biases been different, our technological approaches and means would be different too. see, for example we are just starting to use crystals/light as technology, actually in the very places of other technologies we used before. when all these technologies based on light/crystal interactions are advanced enough, they will definitely shape our culture and expectancies too. what if we had had started those earlier ? or, even, what if we did start out with renewable sources of energy naturally found on our planet ? and our entire manufacturing had been shaped with that ?
no - science and technology are not independent of societal biases. ALL kinds of approaches may reach the same ultimate point of whatever it will reach in some unknown future point in time, but, the path traveled would be different depending on bias. and that ultimate point seems infinitely far off for us.
hence the half assedness of approaches.
Read radical news here
If we can detect broadcast emissions that indicate that sitcoms, game shows and reality shows were once broadcast, but have all now disappeared, that would seem to indicate a 'civilization' has finally developed.
Ah, not quite -- the Vulcans had noticed humans before, but considered them to be insufficiently advanced to warrant further study or interest. When the warp signature was detected they decided to investigate. The moral of the story? It's not so much detecting alien life that matters, but attracting interest from alien life. If it's out there, it's looking for us... for better, or for worse. We just need to give them a reason to say hello.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I can find them by looking for concentrations of small ethnic restaurants.
Good luck with that.
Ooh, I know this one: The Interstellar Raven. And the the Galaxy quoth: "Nevermore!"
Dyson spheres (or swarms) would probably be the best way to detect an advanced civilization, especially a Kardashev Type II or Type III civilization.
In a Dyson sphere (or swarm) a civilization surrounds an entire star to capture most or all of its luminosity; severely cutting down on its optical luminosity but accentuating the IR luminosity. (The physics of a rigid sphere surrounding a star are pretty challenging, and some sort of swarm or cloud seems more likely, at least to our limited technological understanding.) So, to hunt for a Dyson sphere, you look for objects with an unusual excess of IR, and a lack of optical light. The IRAS IR satellite was used to search for Dyson spheres within ~ 1000 light years of the Earth (producing a handful of so-so candidates). Carrigan calls these sorts of searches "Interstellar Archaeology." They have one great advantage in that they don't require any cooperation from the other end (i.e., no beacons or other signals).
As it happens, I have recently speculated that "Object X" in M33 (the Triangulum Galaxy) could represent the signature of a Dyson sphere / swarm from 3 million light years away. If this (unlikely) possibility were to be true, it would represent the signature of a Kardashev Type III or near Type III civilization. Interstellar Archaeology is the only possible form of SETI across such vast distances.
If you want to communicate with the other intelligent races in the Universe, go help the LHC.
Steps:
1) figure out physics
2) build the most promising communicator or detector
3) try, wait, try, wait, try, wait.
4) goto 2
We're making progress on step 1) but step 2) is far too premature at this point.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Almost sounds like, aptly enough, Quarantine by Greg Egan. Though I could have sworn there was another novel with a similar premise. (Herbert, perhaps?)
The 'math' on aliens doesn't really work out in favor of them being anything we can comprehend, much less communicate with, even if you believe as I do that the existence of alien races is almost a mathematical certainty.
Here goes:
Age of universe, something around 14 gy (gigayears).
Age of earth, around 4.5 gy.
(Now, it's reasonably certain that the solar system is actually at least 'round 2' in this neighborhood - due to the presence of trans-iron elements, etc. At least one generation of stars in the area coalesced, evolved, and exploded spewing these deep stellar fusion products across the area. Given the known distribution of these heavy elements, it's likely that the pre-solar-system planetary nebula was created by both ejecta from red giants and multiple erupting giant stars. Giant stars have extremely short life spans, on the order of 100 megayears, so let's consider generously that process took about 1 gy in total.)
So...from nothing to us = ~5.5gy.
Let's assume our evolutionary track and our star are entirely average.
It's taken our planet 5.5gy to produce a space-traveling, sentient species. (No, we're not there yet, but probably less that 500 years, so bear with me.) We as recognizable members of our species have been around perhaps 2 my.
Assuming any other suitable system (and I'd guess that there are hundreds of millions) could do the same, and further assume that the early universe was simply uninhabitable for whatever reason for at least 4 gy. That means any other species is going to be anywhere on the scale of evolution, from say (us minus 2 my) to (us+4 gy). Think about that scale.
If it were represented by a 2 meter stick, all of human existence (2my) is the first millimeter.
You tell me, are we LIKELY to run into a species in the first millimeter of that stick (ie find some species grubbing around as cavemen, once we start exploring)? What are the odds that we brush up against a civilization only a few thousand years more advanced (ie classic "spaceships" and recognizable "explorers", etc) - say something like the next 1 or 2 nanometers on that 2 meter stick?
Or is it far, far, far more likely that other species, on average are likely to be hundreds of millions, or billions of years more advanced than us? Then ask yourself - could we see them, no matter how hard we tried, if they didn't want us to? A *BILLION* years more advanced, presumably with the increasing rate of technological development that we see here on Earth? Assuming they would even deign to watch us, like we occasionally stop and are amused at ants working to busily on the sidewalk...do ants have any idea they're being observed? Could they even comprehend us? They truly would be gods, and (I imagine, by their standards although human logic almost certainly doesn't apply) it would have to be one seriously farked-up individual of theirs that would actually try to relate to we ants. Hell, from that perspective, things we take to be absolutely natural phenomena like volcanoes and earthquakes, could easily be a bored alien adolescent screwing with us.
So that's my case - the likelihood of us encountering an alien race of only a "little" more advanced tech is vanishingly, almost impossibly small. The only caveat would be that this immediate stellar neighborhood, say 100ly radius, almost certainly all an identical 'environment', and the chance of parallel evolution occurring close in time might be even an order of magnitude higher than the 'open' universe in general. But that's an order of magnitude on a very, very small number to start.
-Styopa
Will be slaves of an expanding culture like us or simply will try to enjoy their lives while it lasts? Intelligence don't imply culture, civilization don't imply changing their planet or solar system in a way visible from here.
I suppose that the question of if will ever be able to be surpassed the speed of light could matter here. If don't, will matter very little if we find something weird far away from here. And if the speed of light is not the limit, and they could figure how to surpass it in practice, probably will try to make hard to spot them, always could be around a bigger fish.
We could try instead to figure how to communicate or understand intelligences (whales, dolphins, others) and civilizations (ants? bees?) that are right here to see what we could expect out there and our chances to detect them in our current stage.
If movies have taught us anything, it's that every colony ship ever is bound to encounter some form of intelligent life. Hollywood wouldn't lie to us, right?
At this point, funding is more important than brainstorming. The Allen Array which does much of the basic SETI work is going to be essentially inoperative for about a year due to a severe shortage of funds. See http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/innovation/04/25/seti/index.html?hpt=C1. Right now, the main thing that is needed is cash not more ideas. So go over to SETI.org and donate.
Stellar engineering!?! Any civilization capable of that would be capable of finding another planet.
And propulsion signatures, Really? What exactly would that look like?
The whole thing reads like someone watches too much TV.
Gases in the atmosphere are about the only thing that can be remotely sensed. But I'm sure someone could imagine a non-intelligent life form that could emit chlorofluorocarbons or just about anything else anyone would care to associate with civilization on earth.
And Dyson Spheres. Yeah, that might work. Any civilization that could pull that off would already be HERE, probably farming US.
You might have far more luck detecting a civilization at about the same stage as our own, by the debris field of dead satellites orbiting various planets and moons. But that requires getting closer than we have the technology to do.
But the article begins with the big hand-wave:
Currently – apart from a radio, or other wavelength, transmission carrying artificial and presumably intelligent content – it’s thought that indicators of the presence of an alien civilization might include...
It seems to me that radio transmissions and artificial light sources would be likely used by most civilizations at one time in their development, simple because radio and light occur naturally from many sources, and "discovery" is easy. Either or both is likely be used, even if only briefly in any civilization of planet dwelling creatures.
I don't think its fruitful to set about detecting Dyson Spheres when the radio would have reached us long before their sun dimmed.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Typical deep space comm channels run into the Ka-band spectrum (26-40GHz). The path loss at 32 GHz, between the two stations separated by 50 LY, is an unimaginably large 416dB. Taking the largest fully steerable dish on earth (DSN 70m dish), running at a communications frequency of 32GHz, 400kW transmitter output, and a communications bandwidth that's good enough for 20 word-per-minute Morse code, one could theoretically close the circuit between an identically equipped station 50 LY distant. You could possibly signal somewhere around 300 baud hayes modem speeds circa 1980 if you really worked at it.
http://www.propagation.gatech.edu/ECE6390/project/Fall2010/Projects/group7/Project%20Website_v3_files/Page550.htm
1) Rotation wobbles more on Friday nights
2) Neon light from dark side
3) Traces of THC in the upper atmosphere
4) SETI calls go into voicemail
1) Intelligent life is fairly common.
2) We are somewhere in the middle of the bell curve advancement wise.
3) Really advanced races harvest stars for their energy and matter.
Thus, all we need to do is look for stars disappearing in an orderly fashion, and we've got the proof (and then we should hope like heck they don't stumble across our solar system with its moist chewy centre)
The detection of an atomic bomb throws off a unique signature not found in nature.
True but the question we then have to ask is do we want to contact an alien civilization that is throwing atomic bombs around...and is there any point given that chance are they will not be around for much longer? Even then atomic bombs are not that powerful considering that the planet is sitting not that far from a thermonuclear furnace many orders of magnitude larger than the entire planet.
If they don't have that then you probably don't want to talk to them anyway because they: 1- are too primitive, have no tech- nothing to trade or steal. 2- are envioro-nazis
A Dyson Sphere would block visible light, but radiate in the infrared with just as much energy as the star it encloses. What you'd see from a distance is a stellar object too cold and too large to be a star, but still highly visible.
But this assumes that anyone out there is crazy enough to build one of those things in the first place.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
David Brin, Crystal Spheres
Play Command HQ online
Just put a big mirror next to it.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
This step is simple: invent an FTL method of communication.
The reasoning is also simple. If we can have FTL then it is a given that all developed civilizations are using it. Radio is simply too slow. We don't use pigeons anymore to send messages, do we? So why do we expect an alien civilization to spend terawatts of energy and thousands of years to blast radio signals into space?
But if we can't have FTL then pretty much we are prisoners of our star system. Perhaps generation ships can export our genes to other stars, but that is unlikely, and we will never [in practical terms] know how they fared. Ping times of thousands of years are simply out of our time scale, until we all become cyborgs or beings of pure energy.
So that's why FTL is the only possible solution. Anything less is just a waste of money and effort. This effort should be invested into science, in every way possible. Even if FTL is absolutely impossible in our Universe, perhaps we will find a neighboring Universe with physical laws that are more to our liking.
Anything but radio. We'd highly unlikely to find ETs broadcasting in the electromagnetic spectrum at all.
If our civilization is anything to go by, the uptake of fibre optics and low-power short range wireless communication means broadcasting high power transmissions was a brief abberation in history.
Obviously Interstellar communication by light is futile. At best a civilization may do in-system communication by high power highly focused laser beams. We may by chance catch a brief flash of coherent light as a misdirected beam is aimed at our system by chance.
Our own communications infrastructure turns ever inward, becomes more focused and less leaky. To a hypothetical ET observer the earth must slowly falling silent.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
That "somehow" has been proven impossible, information can't be transmitted faster than that or things like perpetual motion (maxwell's demon via altering past choices) and violation of casualty (killing your mother in the past) would be possible.
Just direct Fox News broadcasts to it.
They are so full of shit they have massive amounts to spare.
a Ringworld would need the planetary matter of a Neptune and 23,000 years of total solar output to spin up to 1G.....bad budget issue for our aliens, they'd do something simpler like many solar powered rotating space stations.
Even if none of these planets have intelligent life, its still worth taking a look. A habitable world in another star system say 20 years travel away is hardly too far to "know what happened". A world in another star system that can support human life is a "game changer".
We desperately want to meet the aliens. Unless they are illegal aliens, then they should GTFO.
It seems that Aliens only want to address us by probing the rectums of trailer park inhabitants. It doesn't seem to be a stretch that Aliens are entranced by rectums and trailer parks.
If we concentrated our search for trailer parks, we are likely to find the places Aliens at least like to go on holiday; and that would be a start!
that there is life anywhere in the universe, than that there may be more life somewhere else in the universe.
A Dyson Sphere would block all light but a massive structure like in Ringworld would cause a dim band around a star rather than the brief dimming that means simply there's a planet. There's no known natural object that would block a region of a star for an extended period. A tight asteroid belt would cause dimming but not block most of the light. Look for a star with a significantly dimmed region or one that appears to be in two parts. Current telescopes would more than likely see most stars are solid even if there was a dim band so when higher powered ones become available it could be another thing to look for.
Luc Arnold looked into this and concluded that
Multiple artificial objects would produce light curves easily distinguishable from natural transits.
He is including structures like the Ring World (or the Culture's Orbitals) in such "multiple artificial objects."
If I were an advanced alien civilization, I'd probably need a lot of energy, and I'd probably be doing "star engineering" on a much larger scale than what's suggested here.
I'd modify a star to project its energy in focused beams, like the jets of a quasar.
I'd make a Project Orion powered by supernovae.
If I were a human looking for ETs, I'd look for signs of them in the highest energy interactions that we can see. Patterns? Events that don't appear completely random? etc
I wouldn't look for human-like ideas of life or technology. If I was exploring the seabed I wouldn't think "well, life would have to develop large solar-collecting surfaces to survive in the very dim conditions"... I'd look to where the energy is, like sea vents, where lo and behold!, there is life that is unlike anything that exists on the surface.
I don't think stellar engineering seems as difficult at interstellar travel. We have significant sources of hydrogen in-system, and building enough ships to evacuate the entire population is probably harder than building some simple machines to strip hydrogen off of jupiter and shoot it in the sun's direction.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Just look for anything out of the ordinary, and once you find it, try to come up with an explanation. This way you'll not only find life (if it exist) but also other interesting phenomena.
Spacefaring civilizations will mine lighter elements from gas giant atmospheres, and dismantle their moons for heavier elements. The debris from the moons will form rings.So look for large ring systems...
Space junk.
Attention zealots and haters: 00100 00100
Stellar engineering!?! Any civilization capable of that would be capable of finding another planet.
Never heard of nostalgia? Should humanity ever escape the earth and populate the stars, I'd imagine that sol will be one of the last ones to go dark, in the far future.
And propulsion signatures, Really? What exactly would that look like?
He's thinking about that spurious Project Rho page on space stealth I think.
If these are the criteria, we will never be detected by others: "where a star's lifetime is artificially extended to maintain the habitable zone of its planetary system; or debris created from asteroid mining."
Move sig!
All the planets combined are a fraction of one percent the sun's mass. I don't think Jupiter will cut it.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
It is not for me and cannot detect me .hehe .scarpe Hogan :http://www.scarpahogan.com/
If the aliens are about as lucky as we are with nuclear power, isotope analysis of their atmosphere might indicate that they were experimenting with nuclear fission at some point in the last couple of million years.
I think it's probably a falsifiable hypothesis. If we can concentrate research on any arbitrary area and gather ever larger amounts of data from that area and others, we can probably find some way to work out what kind of information processing would be necessary for this simulation to work. I suspect it would turn out to be unrealistic even for alien/made-up tech and even then that's assuming they have some way of knowing which bit we're focusing space telescopes on from moment to moment...
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
"I'm reading life-signs captain. Approximately 350,000 inhabitants, all humanoid."
We're already infected by deadly memes (religions). Doesn't get much more 'deadly' to the individual than strapping on an explosive vest. ;)
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
A stellar civilization may need to harness more of the power of its sun. This could involve massive solar power arrays orbiting the star close enough to cast a planet-sized shadow without the gravitational effect of a planet. We ought to be able to spot anything like that, and consider it a possible sign of smarter-than-us life.
Seth Shostak was asked in an interview what would he broadcast into space for the benefit of ET, and he said basically send the entire internet. When it was pointed out that there would be a lot of pr0n, he opined that it's not likely to be a problem. It'd be like National Geographic for them.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
What an interesting post, I've thought the same things, especially about colonising our own solar system. Once we get there then we can try to figure out the next step of colonising the galaxy.
I was also considering a situation that *if* there were other civilisations that launched robots to explore the galaxy based on their own versions of AI could they combine over time. Could there ever be a situation where 80 percent of the Galaxies intelligent life is "artificial" and 20% has evolved naturally. Imagine if that is what our AI enhanced explorers discovered.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
No, no, no. You have to take fuel away. The lifetime of stars is inversely related to their mass. A red dwarf will still be burning when our sun is only a distant memory from 70 or 80 billions years ago.
Of course, this is all a remarkably silly proposition, as nobody is going to moderate the mass of the sun in any way whatsoever. Which is a shame, because global warming and cooling are in the end caused by the state of Mr. Sun, and that state is utterly beyond our control barring the discovery of new physics that I as a physicist cannot even imagine, E.E. "Doc" Smith space opera fantasy that violates all currently known physical laws and common sense. You could drop Mars into the sun and not significantly alter its steady state (aside from perhaps unleashing a burst of radiation sufficient to resterilize the Earth). Remember, you could drop the Earth itself into just one of its typical sunspots with room to spare. Even Jupiter is only 0.00095 times the mass of the Sun.
The best way to find distant civilizations is to a) do what we are doing now -- build better eyes that can see and catalog extrasolar planets; b) continue to work on discovering the rest of physics, hoping that we discover that the Universe is not as fundamentally closed to us as it appears to be; c) one way or another, go look for them.
c) at the moment is almost completely out of the question -- the energy costs of interstellar travel in anything like reasonable human times are truly ludicrous (and of course the dollar costs more so). New physics could change that; so could a rational society, but not while we spend close to half of what we make on a mix of mythology and war instead.
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Look for poor immigration laws?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
> Can we really extend the life of our own sun? I can't even begin to calculate how that would work...
Well, for one, we should start using it only when it's dark outside.
1. Build a Big Ass Interferometer Optical telescope
preferably in space to avoid any problems with the atmosphere
basically a load of smaller telescopes all joined together / looking at the same target to gain higher resolution
2. Point it at the dark side of a planet
3. Look for any Street Lighting
Well, perhaps these are possible, although perhaps not in the way we imagine now. I'm not saying that, I'm just loosely paraphrasing Michio Kaku.
They didn't knew it was impossible, so they did it. - Mark Twain
No, a "rational" society would look at the costs of interstellar travel and conclude that any attempt at a mission to another star was ludicrously overpriced and had absolutely zero practical value in any meaningful timeframe.
And now we know why suicide can be a rational choice.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Not sure I'm getting the point. Neutrino beams, as you say, are a bitch to generate, and just as much a bitch to detect/demodulate (because of the non-interacting-with-matter thing). So why would anyone use them to communicate, when EM based comms are easy?
Change seems to be the only constant of life. Look for a change in atmospheric composition, in RF "noise", in anything we can measure really. The galactic equivalent of a motion detector. Not all change represents life, but it does represent something worth investigating. And, of course, the change might not be occurring on a scale we can measure in a short timeframe (where short would be less than our average lifetime), but it would almost certainly be faster than traveling anywhere with existing technology.
Anything else -- the absence or existence of certain elements -- is even more speculative than postulating a cause for change. The only exception might be something we can be reasonably certain hasn't occurred naturally, such as a signal carrying intelligence (modulation), which is the whole drive behind SETI. The problem with only looking for modulated EMR, is that it limits the domain to strictly intelligent life, which, while extremely interesting, could well be too high a threshold.
The other problem is that given the vast distances of space, anything we discover will be ancient history at best, and quite possibly long gone. The only way we're likely to actually communicate with another intelligent species is if they happen to be remarkably close by, or if one of us masters the manipulation of space-time.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
The problem with that is that the central region of the sun is not convective. If you dump hydrogen into the sun, it'll stay in the outer atmosphere. To get the sun to live longer, you'd need to get hydrogen into the core (which is a temporary solution), or you could pull helium out of the core (which could make the sun last a hubble time or more if you keep doing it.) Either is a feat of engineering that seems pretty difficult without technology indistinguishable from magic.
Support SETI@home
To extend the life of the sun you need to pull the helium out of the core. Adding a Jupiter worth hydrogen won't do a thing.
Support SETI@home
Shouldn't we be trying to detect life first? I've always wondered why we haven't detected absorption spectra for chlorophyll or a similar material (I read recently about the possibility of grey/black leafed plants) in space around stars. If plants are black then they won't leave much reflected light to detect.
An intelligent civilization will realize that a great way to let others know that intelligent life exists in that solar system is to put some Sulfur in the atmosphere of their star. Stars are well studied and the chemical ratios are well known, therefore, with an anomaly more than and order of magnitude above your uncertainty, you would know some intelligent being did this. Of course I do not recommend WE do this, as Aliens may not be friendly.
Wouldn't moving to another star be easier than moving something heavier than the earth?
Of course I do not recommend WE do this, as Aliens may not be friendly.
But yet you suggest other civilizations might realize this is a great way to let others know, but be too dumb to realize the dangers?
The amount of sulfur needed prevents sustainability of such a project over the time span needed for detection by any other intelligent life forms. How often do WE do spectral analysis on any given random star?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Once we are more advanced it won't matter, and once we are more advanced I'd think we'd be doing spectral analysis of all the stars in the sky 24 hours a day.
More advanced than who?
If you don't know who is out there, how can you be sure you are more advanced?
What about the civilization of in search of other naive civilizations of easily harvested edible individuals with high quantities of their favorite condiment, sulfur. Love the taste of meat-sticks pan seared with sulfur. So crunch on the outside and chewy on the inside.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
you nerds need to stop this crap right now! Me and my family don't need the freakin Klingons bustin' down our door and eatin' our innards. Now go back into the basement and play with your legos and unix scripts.
ROFL, fly halfway across the galaxy just for a meal? I don't think Aliens exist anyway, so all this research and brain storming is all just in good fun.
Probably. But maybe we'll be incurable homebodies in 4 billion years.
Support SETI@home
We already tried this on a planet called Earth eons ago. The ape descendants are currently dominant, but their time will pass and the other citizens of that planet will have their epoch as well, all representatives of the species in the galactic neighborhood, although in most cases a mere shadow of their cousin species in their respective star systems. Once they get all that xenophobia and resource scarcity out of their systems we will return, but for now we are sending them terabytes of transmissions per second, mostly pr0n, because they simply reproduce way too often, some decided it would be funny for the apes to mate whether in estrous or not, that engineer has been sacked and sent to a dark corner of the universe.
you are in a twisty maze of different passages.
And Dyson Spheres. Yeah, that might work. Any civilization that could pull that off would already be HERE, probably farming US.
Not really as any reader of Niven's "Ringworld" novels could attest. The Dyson Sphere would have about a gazillion times the surface area of a planet and with that they really wouldn't need any place else to go.
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
However you need it to be air pollution for it to be visible. Agricultural and mining pollution tends to be solid or liquid and so will not be so readily detected.
We knew we weren't even the first generation.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
All very nice good stuff - I see one of the authors is at Edinburgh Observatory, so I'll keep my ears peeled in case he ever does any public lectures.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
I'm not sure it's practical to take into account all the expected sources, but a far advanced civilization may be able to communicate by converting energy to mass and back to create a gravitational signal that presumably travels faster than light.
pimtamf