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Hairspray Could Help Us Find Advanced Alien Civilizations
Hugh Pickens writes "Charles Q. Choi reports that hairspray could one day serve as the sign that aliens have reshaped distant worlds because one group of gases that might be key to terraforming planets are CFCs. 'Our hypothesis is that evidence of intelligent life might be evident in a planetary atmosphere,' says astrobiologist Mark Claire at the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science. CFCs are entirely artificial, with no known natural process capable of creating them in atmospheres. Detecting signs of these gases on far-off worlds with telescopes might serve as potent evidence that intelligent alien civilizations were the cause, either intentionally as part of terraforming or accidentally via industrial pollution. 'An industrialized civilization will be one that will use its planetary resources for fabrication, the soon-to-be-detectable-from-Earth atmospheric byproducts of which could be a tell-tale sign of their activity,' says astrobiologist Sanjoy Som. CFCs can be easily recognized in planetary atmospheres because their atmospheric 'fingerprint' (i.e. chemical spectra) is very different from natural elements, and are a tell-tale sign that life on the surface has advanced industrial capabilities. Using state-of-the-art computer models of atmospheric chemistry and climate, researchers plan to discover what visible signs CFCs and other artificial byproducts of alien terraforming or industry might have on exoplanet atmospheres. 'We are about a decade away of being able to measure detailed compositions of the atmospheres of extrasolar planets,' says Som."
Detecting CFCs applies well if you imagine that aliens are human-like. But real aliens can in reality substantially different than humans. The Universe is weird enough to allow some surprises.
I've read some news about some odd planets floating somewhere. One planet is almost entirely sugar, and there's some sort of nebula that is basically alcohol. Life could be present in these odd places, and the way life manifests itself might be totally different from what we see here on Earth.
So yes, CFC is a good sign, but aliens might be much weirder and let's not expect that they follow the same patterns as we do. I mean, aliens don't need hairspray.
...or it's just that the species has more than fifty arms and they invented the aerosol deodorant before the wheel.
Ezekiel 23:20
Hairspray was a really bad movie and I think alien civilizations would be
greatly offended by it and probably Annihilate us and sparing us no quarter.
Are these CFCs made from exotic kinds of matter? Are we looking for advanced civilizations that have been able to synthesize new forms of chlorine, fluorine, carbon, etc., that are different than those that arise from stellar nucleosynthesis? No? In that case, we should be looking for spectra different from naturally occurring molecules, not elements.
Well I guess we are alone in the universe. If no aliens found us in the 80's it's not looking good.
hmmn.. if intelligent aliens would have analyzed Earth's atmosphere 400yrs ago, as proposed, they would have dismissed it saying no life exists in our solar system.
In some ways that's easier because there is no requirement to only look once. They'd see all kinds of interesting atmospheric changes over a couple centuries, not just CFCs. Weathermen studying climate on distant planets will eventually be a growth industry.
You could have fun trying to list atmospheric changes over time. Hmm I'd say first you see lots of particulates from cruddy fire, like london smog in 1800. Then you'd see a lot of sulfur compounds. Then you'd see strange radioisotopes (probably too low concentration to detect remotely, but...). Then CFCs burst on the scene, accumulate for awhile, then stop accumulating. Meanwhile CO2, methane, and O2 ratios start getting weird, for awhile. Drought in developed ag land leads to dust bowls, so the more developed ag land you have, the worse air quality is during droughts. You could probably make environmental planning theory guesses about forest fire management over time based on how fast they burn out. Another good one would be blooming deserts, it takes industrialized civilization to do it quickly, however temporarily.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
If they analyze CFC content in earth atmosphere 30 years ago would conclude that here may still exist life, but that surely isn't intelligent enough.
The problem with CFC is that it's duration is an insignificant blip at cosmic scales. We've used it a little, we're phasing it out because it ruins a rather important layer of the atmosphere.
Our planet will continue to exist for about 5 billion years after the point where we reasonably reached a point that some aliens could contact at all without coming all the way here. (For most of our time on the planet we couldn't receive radio and didn't have telescopes.) Out of that, we've been abusing CFC heavily for maybe 50 years.
Let's say that t would take a while to get weaned off them, and for the upper atmosphere to gradually clear of them. Like maybe 500 years instead of 50. But it's still 500 years out of 5 billions.
That's a chance of of 1 in ten millions that if a civilization is there, you'll detect it by CFCs.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Intelligence isn't something that happens over night. They may not mess up their biosphere on the night we glance at it but that doesn't mean they didn't before.
gigawatts of radio waves put into space: check
at a wavelength interesting to astronomers: check
low--frequency modulation, common phase: check (think Fourier analysis over months of data to filter out unmodulated light of a nearby star)
characteristic spectral fingerprint of artificial light: check
not limited to a civilisation's "radio window": check
...and that's good enough for me. He points out that the Milky Way is only 100,000 ly wide. Therefore, if there were alien life out there with advanced civilizations, they would find travelling such a small distance a piece of cake and would have discovered us by now. But they haven't. And Tegmark says if the whole galaxy we live in has no life, it's highly unlikely there's life any elsewhere, either -- even if the universe is infinite, it's likely we're the only living creatures in it.
So what they're looking for is evidence of an impulsive, short-sighted species like us.
It will probably be associated with evidence that the species no longer exists.
This movie.
I honestly can't tell if they're wanting attention or are actually trying every avenue to find life. Hairspray? While I'm all for trying to find life on other planets, wouldn't it be far better to improve our space travel capabilities as well as creating some sort of Intergalactic Network? I mean, we know how to make ozone, so wouldn't it be a good move to get comets, land them on Mars, then use the oxygen and water inside of them to partially terraform the planet?
I really feel sorry for the people working at SETI, they must be digging at the bottom of the barrel. It's true what they say, Nobody cares about achievements, they'd rather see something blow up. Keep searching, guys!
No matter if they discovered us. They won't visit us, so far our science knows, they can't, no matter how advanced they are. They could send a signal, but need to be relatively close to both being able to detect us and send a signal with any kind of hope that we detect and understand it (and considering how much people like you is asking for basically banning space investigation, i'd say that the window of opportunity for that is closing).
Anyway, that "useless" space program had a lot of side effects pretty important for us down here, you are using at least one of them right now. Maybe we won't colonize the solar system and start chatting with alien entities anywhere soon, but just trying to make it possible will change our lives for better.
Our society is still too disorganized and prone to impulsive, selfish acts for us to contact an alien civilization.
If we don't immediately make war on them, we'll move in, set up a gift shop and a law firm, then start piping them our TV and selling them whatever junk food has taken over for the Twinkie (RIP).
If you were an alien civilization, and your first contact from outside came from the U.S. Congress and/or McDonald's, or maybe you were exposed to Justin Bieber or dubstep, you might just pull up the welcome mat, throw out technology and go live in caves.
This money that we spend on searching aliens is of course a waste. The same can be said about almost anything except food and medicine all the rest is not really needed for survival of our species. This is one thing. The other is - once we stop spending money on such wasteful things like this (or other) program we waste it another way by sending troops somewhere or some such silly thing. But in general you are right - searching for aliens is futile.
So what you're saying basically is that Earth is a giant red pulsar on a CFC radar.
And future civilizations will refer to us as the ancients and that they should learn from our mistakes.
"Don't be a third rocker!"
"Tiles? They must have been retards."
"Bacon? Mmmmmm"
The prospect of finding an alien civilization that uses hairspray is not very good, given that Little Green Men rarely have hair in Hollywood or Roswell. However, CFCs are less likely to be an indicator of hairspray than plastic foam, circuit board manufacture, Star Trek-esque hypospray propellent, refrigerators or air conditioning. The NY Times just ran an article about how we're still venting CFCs from home central air units in the U.S., over 20 years after the big marketing push to eliminate them.
Well even more to the point. There is the time we Made CFC's and the time we found out it was bad so we stopped using it, a 50-100 year gap. It may take a few hundred years for the chemical to degrade. But you may have a gap of a few hundred years in a planets billions year lifespan, to find evidence of intelligent life.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Didn't the Centuari Republic give Earth jump gate technology in exchange for our advanced hair mousse formulas?
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
went on the B-Ark with the telephone sanitizers etc
I would never have associated 80s hair metal bands with advanced civilization....
We're already phasing out the use of CFCs and will likely not produce any detectable amounts in the near future. Don't they think aliens would learn the same lesson? Giving us, at most, a 100yr window to catch their CFC use? Why do people have this incredibly close minded view of alien life that makes them think that not only will they be like us, with arms and legs, be based on water but also be stuck in the same time period as us as well?
I suspect that we'll eventually find life on nearly all of the planets and even some of the asteroids in our own solar system. Maybe even intelligent life that's trapped under heavy atmosphere that really has had no technological way to explore space. Imagine an intelligent creature floating in the atmosphere of Jupiter or Saturn. They'd have almost no material to build tools out of, much less spacecraft or telescopes. And MOST planets have atmospheres like theirs.
Because nuke testing has only been around less than a hundred years. In universal scales, that's barely worth bothering with. It's literally a fleeting spark. The Sun is 4.6bn years old alone. Even from the Sun, it would have been a long wait to see some activity on earth that you could detect by looking for nukes (if they even have a signature that will travel across the galaxy which seems unlikely given that thousands of them have gone off across the globe in the past and we barely notice *here*, let alone light-years away), and the spectacle would be inherently short-lived (given that we either will switch to another weapon in the next 100 years or blow ourselves up anyway, which nearly happened in the Cold War, let alone modern times).
And then you have to have ANOTHER civilisation somewhere out there, in a SIMILARLY advanced state also detonating nukes and thereby thinking of looking for other's nuke detonations, and they have to be in the same part of space or, critically, roughly the same time as us to notice us - even if they do nothing but stare permanently in the perfect direction to see us and have no obstacles.
If you made a time-lapse on a similar scale (that video is one second = one month) for the entire galaxy since its birth as a galaxy (so you're probably looking at one second = a million years to even get close to something that was about the same length), we'd barely be a tiny colour change, on a tiny single pixel, a blip at the very, very, very, very end of the very last frame of the very last second of the time-lapse and barely even register on the data whatsoever. And that's just a galaxy, of which there are 170 billion by even the best estimate.
And you're expecting a civilisation similarly "blippy" to just happen to be looking at us for the time of their time and see our blip, in an entire universe.
"Damn it, Jim - I'm a doctor, not an air conditioner repairman!"
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
But what about more advanced life? Could we find tell-tale signs that a planetary system had been modified or terraformed in order to make it more habitable for intelligent alien species? For instance, when humans colonize Mars, we will need to raise global planetary temperatures significantly in order to live on the surface without suits.
This seems a lot more interesting to me. As another poster mentioned, would cfc use constitute enough of a civilization's existence to make it a viable means of detecting them? But looking for a planet that is warm enough to have liquid water and is outside the goldilocks zone of its solar system seems like an interesting idea.
The intensity of nearly all signal we put out outside diminush so rapidely as to be non differentiable from galactic noise, within a few AU, maybe 1 LY at most. The only signal which has reached a few dozen LY was the one sent (when was it ? 70 ies ?) from a radio antena a very strong pulse directed at a place far away, and it was 2 times a one minute or two signal. The rest ? Street light ? radio ? TV ? All noise beyond 1 light year.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Hrm...funny how you can measure them out of volcanoes:
http://cfc.geologist-1011.net/
"CFCs are not Volcanic" - Oh Really?
"This statement is one that I keep seeing on websites and blogs, and ties in with the assertions repeated by Warrick & Farmer (1990), Grimston (1992), Hendeles et al. (2007), Colice (2007), Colice (2008), and Green & Stewart (2008, p. 18) to the effect that CFCs are not natural in the environment. If one chooses to measure the gases emerging from volcanic vents instead of taking a politician's word for it, one discovers that volcanoes produce a variety of halocarbons, including CFCs. This fact, along with other natural sources of CFCs including sponges, other marine animals, bacteria (both marine & terrestrial), fungi (both marine & terrestrial), plants (both marine & terrestrial), lichen, insects, is so well documented that it is the subject of ongoing textbook publication (Gribble, 2003; Jordan, 2003). Stoiber et al. (1971) first measured and documented CFCs venting from Santiaguito in Guatamala. Since, there have been many studies corroborating the volcanic emission of CFCs (Isidorov et al, 1990; Isidorov et al., 1993; Jordon et al., 2000; Schwandner et al., 2000; Schwandner et al., 2002; Schwandner et al., 2004; Frische et al., 2006). Although some authors attempt to correlate volcanogenic CFCs to atmospheric variations, the confirmation of soil diffusion decay with distance from the vent (Schwandner et al., 2004) still stands in stark contradiction of Frische's hypothesis."
I'm one of the scientists involved in the project. We see this primarily as a search for terraformed worlds, rather than looking for inadvertent technological byproducts. We've started a kickstarter-like drive to do the fundamental research needed to find out if an actively terraformed world would be detectable over astronomical distances. Details are here: http://www.petridish.org/projects/do-aliens-use-hairspray -Mark
If it's from hairspray, they can't be all *that* intelligent.
Judge for yourself- here are some pictures of aliens we've discovered using the hairspray detection technique.
Their communications technology is still remarkably primitive though.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Hi all. I'm one of the scientists involved in this project. We are trying out this new kickstarter-for-science approach as it's both hard to get NASA funds for SETI, and it's also surprisingly hard to get small "seed money" type grants to do cutting edge work. We've started our own non-profit scientific research organization (http://bmsis.org) and are trying to do science outside the confines of the traditional academic structure. We'd love your support if you can (http://www.petridish.org/projects/do-aliens-use-hairspray) but more than that, we'd love to hear any ideas/answer questions about the project.
>each life form so far changed
You missed the "intelligent" qualification.
We are killing ourselves with our own pollution. This is due to our success as an animal. Every non-intelligent animal suffers population collapses due to population rising above sustainable levels. We are about there.
We are killing ourselves with pollutants and "deskjobs" and plentiful food which is not what our bodies are adapted for.
We are not acting any more intelligent than rats or crows.
A planet populated by Dolly Partons.
Have gnu, will travel.
So only bald aliens will remain safe and anonymous from interplanetary predators. Perhaps we should breed a race of Yule Brenner's to survive.
Table-ized A.I.
You're not thinking in cosmic terms. Even if we ignore the rest of the universe outside our galaxy our planet is still 4.5 BILLION years old, and our sun was a relative latecomer to the party of 3rd-generation stars likely to have Earth-like planets - meaning there was plenty of time for human-level civilizations to develop elsewhere in our galaxy before our planet even formed. If life were common then at least one of those civilizations would likely have taken to the stars, and even if they only ever traveled at 0.1% of light speed they'd still have had plenty of time to explore the entire galaxy by now, and probably seeded life wherever they went - even if it evolved from the microbes clinging to the bottoms of their shoes or thrown out with their garbage it could have a billion-year head-start on us (or for that matter it could *be* us, Earth life does appear to have made a few sudden leaps forward in the early eons, any one of which could be the result of "invasion" by alien microbes).
The logical conclusion is that either
1) life-bearing planets are rare
2) or intelligent civilizations rarely evolve on them
3) or they commonly wipe themselves out before taking to the stars (since an interstellar species would be extremely resistant to extinction-level events)
4) or we just haven't figured out how to detect them yet
5) possibly because our current level of technology is transitional and nobody else within our light cone is generating/looking for structured radio emissions
So far (1) is looking increasingly unlikely - we haven't found evidence of life yet, but it's questionable whether we'd be able to detect it yet, and we're finding rocky planets everywhere we look. The others are still open questions.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Natural fission reactors occur and can vent their byproducts to the atmosphere. Detection of fission products would not necessarily be a marker for life.
Hi All, I'm also one of the scientists involved. While we'd love to go "hunting for aliens" directly, this project is more about how to recognize evidence of industrialization from afar. As you likely know, extrasolar planets are being discovered left and right, and so the next step in the process of discovery will be to measure the composition of those atmospheres because they may give clues to the processes happening on the planetary surface. But what are we going to compare those compositions to? Modern Earth? Sure, but one data point is not terribly great, so our work here is to build a database of atmospheric compositions that would be strong contenders for having an industrialized civilization below. It turns out it's more straightforward to measure "industrial pollution" in an atmosphere than natural occurring gases that may be in disequilibrium because of timid biological processes. But we need your support to do this! And you can be involved by contributing. We are a non-profit science institute passionate about space exploration, astrobiology, and science communication. Your donations to this project are tax deductible as we have 501(c)3 status. http://www.petridish.org/projects/do-aliens-use-hairspray You can find out more about our research at http://www.bmsis.org/publications, or join our space exploration and astrobiology social/collaborative network at http://www.saganet.org./ But where we need your financial support today is at http://www.petridish.org/projects/do-aliens-use-hairspray Thanks for your time! And don't hesitate to post questions! ..and follow us on Twitter! @BlueMarbleSpace, @Saganorg, #alienhairspray - cheers
Our sun is a comparative newcomer among 3rd-generation sun-like stars, the window for human-level civilizations to have evolved in our galaxy has been open for BILLIONS of years, plenty of time for a civilization to colonize the entire galaxy even if they never travel at even 1% of lightspeed.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
CO2 isn't the biggest problem terraforming Venus, but even the CO2 problem probably can't be solved with just bacteria. Carl Sagan was one of the original proponants of that idea, but after further study, he conceded that it wouldn't work because of thermodynamics (it's currently just too hot, you must first cool it down to make those reactions stable).
Changing the day/night ratio to something reasonable and establishing some sort of magnetic field to block out solar radiation would probably also be required (and perhaps these are related problems). I'm pretty sure these problems probably couldn't be solved as a grad-student synthetic biology project.
Because nuke testing has only been around less than a hundred years.
Above ground testing only lasted for about 20 years, from 1945 until the middle of the sixties when we signed the test ban treaty with the USSR.
Free Martian Whores!
The Golgafrinchans of 'Ark B' will be glad to have new salon clients.
So, their astronomers less than a 50 light years away ran their version of Kepler, looked at Sol, found Sol-5 and Sol-6, and with some luck Sol-3 and they noticed the liquid water fingerprint and selected it as a likely candidate for a life-hosting planet. Then they made more and better observations and they found the CFC fingerprint and figured that Sol-3 must have a technological civilization living there.
What do they do next? Build their version of SKA and point it at Sol-3 hoping to catch radio signals? There won't be much to find yet. They probably need to keep observing for another 20 years at least. What if they looked 100 years too early? They would have noticed the water, but not much more. They might be able to figure out that Sol-3's atmosphere is mostly nitrogen and oxygen. Will they keep observing in the hopes that something interesting happens? How soon will they be able to notice the subtle changes in the atmosphere's composition?
That's correct, a test for CFC producing life can't detect non-CFC producing life. /thank_you_captain_obvious.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Weathermen studying climate on distant planets will eventually be a growth industry.
Funny you should say that, a lot of what we know about climate came from studying Earth rocks and other planets atmosphere's, the main question in the first half of the 20th century was "what caused the ice ages", from there they have built up a good history of the inner planets climate and the mechanisms by which they evolved. Until very recently most people assumed god created and micro-managed the climate for our benefit, the only circumstantial evidence for that theory is that when the Texas Governor asked people to pray for rain recently, Texas burst into flames.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
. CFCs are entirely artificial, with no known natural process capable of creating them in atmospheres.
Odds are good we'll find at least trace amounts of CFCs in the lunar crust. Any volcanism with high concentrations of chlorine, fluorine, and carbon can create CFCs.
Well I guess we are alone in the universe. If no aliens found us in the 80's it's not looking good.
Plenty of aliens found us in the 80's. However, they did so using microscopic-sized nano-probes, extremely powerful telescoping cameras and the second and third track titles of Duran Duran's self-titled album, so we never noticed.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
As you can see here the aliens logically concluded "You're looking at planet earth. There's no sign of life." How this music video can be explained without recourse to alien communication is beyond me.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
So, we broadcast Hairspray the musical to the galaxy and see who complains about the acting (overacting) ... right????
Sure enough, the cow costume was hanging up next to the superhero outfit and sailors uniform. (S,Spud)
i saw "Hairspray". It had nothing to do with aliens! :-) Although, Edna Turnblad / Arvin Hodgepile (aka Divine) could qualify... Not to mention, there's someone in it named "Mink Stole"... No, that IS someone's real life name!
so now we use flourinated hydrocarbons instead, still an obvious sign
Actually that's exactly when the severe city pollution epsisodes began in europe, heavy burning of hydrocarbons (coal) began
and as for life, our atmosphere is obviously the product of life, you can't have high concentration of oxygen without something working on the carbon dioxide