this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2024
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Cosmic Horror
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Doesn't matter. Any intelligent alien species smart enough to interpret radio frequencies could also see the Oxygen and Methane in the atmosphere and figure out there's life.
Additionally, they'd see all the CFCs, and manufactured chemicals we've been dumping into the atmosphere and know there was post-industrial life. The way our sun's light interacts with our atmosphere makes a bigger signpost than any radio broadcast we can make.
We've been announcing our existence to the universe ever since the Great Oxygenation Event, if not before. All they need is a telescope and basic spectroscopy from the chemical signatures of our atmosphere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_line
https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Ariel/Studying_exoplanet_atmospheres_with_Ariel
https://science.nasa.gov/resource/spectroscopy-infographic/
There's a bird in the forest, plain for all to see, if they look. But they're not looking until he starts singing.
(Serious, does that analogy stand up?)
Depends on the alien species: We humans are already looking at other planets and their atmospheres, and we have no hope of going there or making contact with anything even if it exists.
If they are anywhere near as curious and as advanced as humans, they've probably spotted us already. (well, "as advanced as humans", we've only been able to look at other planet atmospheres since like ~2016, when ever certain satelites launched, soo...)
Sounds like a Chinese proverb.
In a sense, yes and no. It's far easier to pick out some very irregular signal (human communication) in a sea of noise (all the spectra coming from every planet orbiting a star) than to randomly recognise that a specific planet has a specific atmospheric composition. At the same time: To pick out that signal, they have to be scanning the part of their sky where the earth is.
To put it this way: Any advanced civilisation that takes a closer look at our specific planet (as we're doing every day with loads of planets) and looks at the absorption spectrum of our atmosphere (like we do) would recognise that there's a high probability of life on our planet. Maybe they could even infer a high probability of "intelligent" life (broadly speaking). On the other hand, any civilisation that looks in our general direction would likely be quick to notice that there's some non-random signal coming from around where we are, and may decide to check it out more closely, eventually homing in on our planet. At that point, they'll likely be quite certain (together with the evidence from our atmosphere) that there is intelligent life on our planet.
Either way, I like the following way of looking at things: The universe is estimated to be around 13 billion years old. The Earth is estimated to be around 6 billion (please arrest me if I'm wrong here, I'm talking off the top of my head). For the first couple billion years, no planets, or at least planets with relatively diverse elemental composition, existed. I see it as not entirely unlikely that we're quite early in developing a space-faring society in the universal sense. There's not that many solar systems with the composition needed to sustain life as we know it that came into existence before ours, so we might just be first.
If that's the case, we might be the civilisation that others are warning each other about in a couple million years.
“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”
― Arthur C. Clarke
It may not be an intelligent species that the message is warning about. The fear could be of a creature/species that hungers, and has some senses that we don't.
How far away can that stuff hypothetically be seen from?
The sun ignited about 4.6 Billion Years ago, so anyone around 4.6 billion light years away (a little more due to expansion of the universe) could see that there are planets orbiting a star that's capable of sustaining life could see it with a big enough telescope.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun
Tectonics and water would have been around on Earth for around that same amount of time, so as soon as the Sun fired up, it was showing the universe that there was a planet with water on it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_water_on_Earth
The Great Oxidation Event happened around 2.5 billion years ago, so anyone 2.5 billion light years away would be able to see it with a big enough telescope, and know that something interesting happened that suddenly released a bunch of Oxygen.
We've been ramping up technology for 10,000+ years, but really started dumping interesting chemicals into the atmosphere when the industrial revolution started around 250 years ago (so 10,000 - 250 light years away.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution
We started firing off nukes in the 1940s, so probably the last 80 years we started showing the universe that we're nuclear technological intelligence.
So depending on how far away someone is trying to observe us, they'd be able to see different life stages.
Even in another nearby galaxy, they could see the spectral lines of these signatures if they had our telescopes, and used gravitational lensing. They could even park something like the Hubble Space Telescope a couple hundred AU away from their star and use it as a giant telescope to see us from extremely far distances.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_lens
https://www.universetoday.com/157983/a-solar-gravitational-lens-will-be-humanitys-most-powerful-telescope-what-are-its-best-targets/
https://www.universetoday.com/tag/gravitational-lensing/
Well how far is extremely far? The article you linked says
The galaxy is 87k light years across. Is such a resolution good enough to determine the atmospheric composition of any planet in our galaxy? What about other galaxies?
Obviously there is a delay based on the speed of light where time needs to pass before changes can be seen, but I'm wondering what the radius is where these things become invisible no matter how much time passes, if there is such a limit. There might be intelligent life elsewhere in the universe but not in our galaxy, so if the edge of the galaxy was the limit that would be relevant to our security.
You don't need resolution to do spectral analysis. They're talking about identifying specific features, which isn't what we're talking about.
An ideal situation would be to look at a star (you only need to be able to pick out a single star, which you can do in other galaxies in the right conditions) and have a planet pass between that star and us. You'd see the change in color of the light and from that you can determine a lot about the planet's atmosphere.
With our current technology, you have to get pretty lucky to have gravitational lensing opportunity along with a planetary transit, but that's just assuming our level of tech.
With a powerful enough telescope, if you can pick out the specific planet and not get overwhelmed by it's star's light, you can do it without being lined up with the star.
If you're a high tech enough civilization to be an actual threat to another planet, then you can build telescopes in space. If you build telescopes in space, they can be giant, and positioned wherever you want them. If that's the case then you can likely directly measure the atmosphere of any planet big enough to support life in the entire galaxy, along with plenty of samples in the nearby galaxy.
But also, if you are assuming an alien race that has the capability to transit intergalactic distances in an amount of time that would make them a threat to us, then that means they already have some sort of technology that is so far beyond anything we can currently imagine, that we can already assume they know we are here.
If they can't traverse those distances, then it doesn't matter if they know we're here.
I would say that amount of time is anything less than the remaining lifespan of the universe, if we are in this for the long haul. Even with the speed of light as the limit, it's still something to worry about that we could build a thriving civilization for 20 million years which then is wiped out because that's how long it took for them to get here after they saw us and we were doomed from the beginning.
~60 light years.
We've been broadcasting for longer, but everything we sent before Cold War Era military RADAR would get filtered out by the atmosphere or drowned out by the sun's radiation.
Turns out everything since would be hopelessly scrambled almost immediately upon leaving the suns magnetic field and being subjected to the galactic wind (solar wind but... galactic) And we're only getting more radio quiet as more and more communication becomes wired so we good.
And even then, they would have pretty limited reasons to bother us ahead of schedule. Interstellar space is big, crossing it just to be a dick can't be ruled out, but that's about the only reason anyone would prefer an inhabited planet over a younger, emptier one that's closer.