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."

Comments

Much more than that

[staltz]

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.

Re:Much more than that

[K. S. Kyosuke]

and the way life manifests itself might be totally different from what we see here on Earth.

Harumph. Physics and chemistry work virtually the same way everywhere. What makes you think that they will discover something significantly different from CFCs as an inert propellant?

Re:Much more than that

[clickclickdrone]

I mean, aliens don't need hairspray

Chewbacca begs to differ.

Re:Much more than that

[Fr05t]

One planet is almost entirely sugar, and there's some sort of nebula that is basically alcohol.

Where are these wonderful places, and how soon can I get there?!!?

Re:Much more than that

[vlm]

What makes you think that life on another planet won't have found some biological use for CFCs?

Oh man, talk to a chemist, they are inert, which makes things biologically complicated and the precursors are beyond nasty. For a good time google for Bromotrifluoromethane Synthesis (aka what you non-chemists would call "Halon") and imagine what it takes to make it both industrially and almost unimaginably via biosynthesis. Its not so much the final step that's the problem, but the precursors, processing the raw materials, etc.

Its probably a pretty good "dependency" marker indicating advanced stainless steel fabrication, extensive acid production industries, hmm I'd have to think. Biological tissue has severe issues dealing with fluorine ions, which is too bad.

Its not for lack of evolutionary pressure. Plenty of vessels and orifices would benefit by a native layer of teflon. Imagine the predator prey relations in a world of teflon skin. Some of the room temp liquid CFCs would superficially make a good replacement for that fluid in the bone joints (sorry not doc don't know its technical name).

Theres also some evolutionary pressure in that you'd need a species that eats flourite ore rocks (or at least stuff grown in its soil, or naturally heavily floridated water) AND in the halon example a biological bromine source... One or the other, OK, but at this time of day I can't think of a way to pull off both. Some kind of migratory coastal ruminant mammal? Um...

Also there's some thermodynamics issues, if you could pull off the synthesis in a cell, it would need to be a better idea than simply synth more ATP or hemoglobin or whatever else... Need to find a bio app where CFCs are more beneficial than anything else a cell can synth. CFCs are expensive to make so you need a good reason. Much as superficially silicon based brains "seem" more sensible than neuron based brains but its so hard to make a self reproducing factory the size of a typical mammal womb that its not happening any time soon.

To some extent thats why halon is such a good fire extinguisher around humans. Terrestrial biochemistry has almost no idea how to interact with it, so it pretty much doesn't. CFC suffocation is a zillion times more likely than CFC poisoning. I was told but am too lazy to verify that if you get CFCs into your blood your kidneys get somewhat confused.

Re:Much more than that

[K. S. Kyosuke]

They have significantly different materials to work with

You mean that instead of fluorine, chlorine, and carbon, they have unobtanium, duranium and mithril?

Re:Much more than that

[serviscope_minor]

Oh man, talk to a chemist, they are inert, which makes things biologically complicated and the precursors are beyond nasty.

Perhaps I'm not up to speed on chemistry, but that's only true for the industrial processes that we use. The only ways we can fix nitrogen are currently pretty biologially unfriendly at the moment.

Biological tissue has severe issues dealing with fluorine ions, which is too bad.

True, but some organisms have evolved to deal with it. For instance monofluoroacetate can be produced biologically.

The point is that life on other planets may be quite different from our own. It will probably be based on carbon, since nothing else is nearly so flexible, but I don't see any reason why the chemistry should be anything close.

Plenty of vessels and orifices would benefit by a native layer of teflon.

Quite possibly, though the ability to synthesize some fluorine containing chemicals doesn't indicate the ability to synthesize them all. Also, don't forget that the parts have to be repairable and also have to have wound up there by evoloutionary chance as well.

Very many things end up down a sub-optimal branch from which they cannot escape.

Re:Much more than that

[hoboroadie]

Not only alien life, but proof that stupidity is universal.

Re:Much more than that

[Gilmoure]

Exactly! All this science stuff is just humbug malarkey spread by all e college people who like to flaunt their learning as they drive past in their Suburus. And the only thing worse than an college person are those dirty worker types, all ignorant and stupid and stuff. Nope, the only people you can trust are those that wear nice suits, drive nice shoes, and wear nice cars. the sorta people you find running Wall Street. Their the last, best hope for hoomanity!

Re:Much more than that

[Immerman]

I know the whole space-station/asteroid colony thing is cool, but planets have several advantages

1) Your survival is not dependent on the continuous operation of high technology devices - especially important if you're thinking in terms of millenia and insuring your descendants survive even if they pass through some form of knowledge-sapping Dark Ages.
2) They're big, and virtually indestructible.
3) Any ecological catastrophe is likely to proceed slowly (see 2), likely giving you decades or centuries of to develop a fix rather than the hours or months likely in an artificially constrained ecosystem.
4) They're far more suitable as a "genetic heritage" site if you want a large, chaotic system of thriving genetic diversity
5) Lots of people might well prefer to live within a thriving ecological web than in a rigorously controlled environment. I know I would.
6) And possibly most importantly, if you have suitable candidates terraforming a planet is probably one of the most cost-effective ways to support billions of individuals. In fact the up-front costs of converting Venus (Mars is a much tougher nut to crack) into something way more hospitable than an asteroid are probably negligible - design a bacterium that will thrive in the current environment and bind atmospheric carbon dioxide into some stable solid, then seed the planet with them and wait a few centuries. Sure it takes a while, but it's a grad-student synthetic biology project with extra credit for having your bacteria designed to die off as conditions approach Earth-norm. Heck, we're almost to the point of being able to do such things ourselves. And once you've got a planet in the proper temperature range with a "non-hostile" atmosphere seeding it with "normal" bacteria to add proper amounts of oxygen and establish a thriving microbial biome in which multicellular life can thrive, while perhaps more challenging, is still potentially a research-project level endeavor whose expense will trivial compared to say, building an interstate highway. So basically, given cheap interplanetary travel all you need is a few individuals with vision to work on a centuries-long project and you can quite possibly terraform an "easy" planet to the point that people could walk unprotected outdoors and establish homesteads, even if they have to import their own multicellular life.

Meanwhile building a viable enclosed ecosystem even the size of a small city is likely to be an extremely expensive undertaking, especially when you factor in radiation shielding, meteor defense systems, etc. Not to mention gravity - tethering is relatively cheap, but enough cable to support a city (plus shielding) under anything approaching Earth-norm accelerations is still going to be impressive, not to mention you have to perform ongoing maintenance continuously. Perhaps the whole thing could be done organically as some sort of city-sized organism/symbiosis, but that's supposing a much more advanced level of biotechnology, and you'd still have to feed the thing as it grows, though ideally it could absorb sunlight and some convenient carbonaceous asteroids for most of it's needs.

Re:Much more than that

[IndustrialComplex]

It will take over a thousand years to get there, assuming you're a photon (are you?).

Since I am a photon:

I am already was there.

Re:Much more than that

[IndustrialComplex]

Evolution would suggest that its biochemistry would probably be very much like that of earth life, since evolution favors the "path of least resistance" - biochemistries unsuited for survival will tend to die off, biochemistries efficient at survival will tend to flourish.

Consider the wavelengths of light absorbed by Earth's photosynthesizing plants. Now consider the wavelengths NOT absorbed by plants. These rejected wavelengths (green, mostly) are actually the most abundant, so it is counterintuitive that plants would evolve to effectively discard a useful energy source. It is very odd when you consider that pretty much every bit of free energy is capitalized by some form of life, yet the most abundant wavelengths are rejected.

The going theory is that originally archaea DID make use of the green wavelength and didn't waste energy trying to capture the less valuable reds and blues. Cyanobacteria's ancestors (and the predecessor to our modern green plants) is theorized to have taken advantage of this 'discarded' spectrum where competition was lessened.

Big deal, you may think. However, when you realize that our planet is pretty 'green' rather 'purple' you have to come to terms with the fact that the dominant plant life on Earth actually evolved along the more difficult path, scrounging 'scrap' energy. We aren't completely sure WHY cyanobacteria beat out archaea, because if you were to look at it from an unbiased perspective when life first emerged on the Earth, a betting man would have bet on archaea. It had monopolized the most valuable wavelengths in terms of available energy, was fairly dominant, and by all typical measures, was more 'fit' to its environment. Theories abound that perhaps being forced to use the 'dregs' of light forced early cyanobacteria to be more efficient in its energy usage, evolving processes which wasted less, allowed simpler reproduction, etc, and then a global stressor caused the purple life to falter, the green life took up the slack and never gave back its dominant position.

There are lots of theories to why, but the important fact here is that for some reason, the less likely lifeform became dominant.

Either a hair spray...

[K. S. Kyosuke]

...or it's just that the species has more than fifty arms and they invented the aerosol deodorant before the wheel.

Re:Either a hair spray...

[Exitar]

And yet The Coming of The Great White Handkerchief could have left no traces of them for us to find.

1980's

[The Grim Reefer]

Well I guess we are alone in the universe. If no aliens found us in the 80's it's not looking good.

Re:What if someone analyzed earth 400yrs ago?

[gmuslera]

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

[Moraelin]

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.

Re:The problem with CFC

[Hans Adler]

I think you missed the point about detecting CFCs. It's not about unintended terraforming of someone's home planet. It's about terraforming *another* planet that initially is a bit too cold for the civilisation in question. In human terms we are speaking about creating factories on Mars that pump CFCs into its atmosphere so as to create a more habitable (for us) climate there. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Mars#Using_fluorine_compounds

Re:The problem with CFC

[Mark Claire]

I'm one of the scientists affiliated with this project. It's very true that SETI in general terms is a "needle in a haystack" sort of search. So one way to look at this is that we are suggesting more "needles" to look for. So far, we are searching for radio waves and optical pulses. Looking for technosignature molecules in a planetary atmosphere (if it actually works, which is what we are trying to figure out with our proposal), is a third needle. I also totally agree with your points about looking for "inadvertent" CFC use by a young and dumb civilization like ourselves. As Hans Adler pointed out, we on the science team are thinking of this more as a search for terraformed worlds. For instance, if we were going to colonize Mars and try and live on the surface in the next century or so, we would likely need to warm up the atmosphere, and CFC's would be a good starting place (and possibly detectable over interstellar space)

I'd pick streetlighting

[art6217]

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

Re:I'd pick streetlighting

[ledow]

And light pollution measures and energy saving says that the streetlighting we've had for a mere fraction of a galactic second (i.e. a couple of hundred years) won't be here in that same fraction again.

Hell, as it is, we try to reduce the amount of light that goes somewhere unnecessary (e.g. the sky!) or that is produced and doesn't do anything. There are already countries and cities with lighting that's dynamic based on the cars rolling over it (which means the signal is even HARDER to find, even if you knew what you were looking for).

And in terms of the stretch of a civilisation, lighting visible even from orbit, let alone the other side of the galaxy, is literally a tiny flicker that you'll only catch if you're constantly listening to EXACTLY that, in EXACTLY the right place for a few billion years.

Hell, it's hard enough to see all of Earth's artificial lighting from orbit if there is cloud cover, let alone from somewhere like where Voyager currently is, and as you got further out the inverse square law solves the problem nicely to give you a probability of anyone detecting it tending rather swiftly towards zero.

If you want to detect a civilisation, about the only sensible thing to do is ignore the planets, look at the stars. Because sources of energy that huge, that well light-up, that stable, that predictable and, with suitable technology, even harvestable (I believe it's called a Dyson sphere) are likely to be something that won't stop being a commodity for a long time and activity on them will be inherently visible (even if that's by one-day disappearing entirely).

Think to yourself. I plonk you down into the universe at an unknown point and at an unknown time since the Big Bang. I give you a billion-year-long-life (sound a lot? It's not). How do you find someone who's had the same done to them? The chances are you're not even going to be able to see each other, would never be at the right stages at the right times to communicate with each other before moving onto the "next most advanced / obvious method of communication", and even if you do by some chance talk be too far away or your communication too "out of date" to do anything useful with it.

Until you can quite literally bend space and visit other places, it's all a bit pointless to be looking because of simple physical laws. And by the time you *can* do that, it's easier to just plonk a sensor on every star system with your space bending techniques than it would be to ever listen out for them all.

We are quite literally talking about how to detect a particular mayfly of interest on an entire planet of activity. And by the time we do it, that mayfly has evolved to build its own space program and buggered off deeper into the galaxy anyway.

Hair Mousse not Hair Spray

[DickBreath]

Didn't the Centuari Republic give Earth jump gate technology in exchange for our advanced hair mousse formulas?

Re:natural elements?

[vlm]

.... atmospheric 'fingerprint' (i.e. chemical spectra) is very different from natural elements

Are these CFCs made from exotic kinds of matter?

Yes. This is another "talk to a chemist". Ur doing it wrong, when halogens accumulate in your ozone layer. There seems to be no way to get them there, in extreme bulk, other than CFC release on the surface, or maybe some kind of insane doomsday weapon, both of which indicate extreme industrialization and a certain lack of ecological concern.

A standard /. automotive analogy is car sized lumps of unoxidized iron with certain precise and consistent fractions of dissolved carbon found on top of strips of heavy petroleum fractions mixed with gravel is just too weird geologically and biochemically to be anything but the product of intelligent life. You just don't find those elements laying around in that physical configuration.

Found via the Sigue Sigue Sputnik satellite...

[Dogtanian]

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.

Ask Me Anything

[Mark Claire]

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.