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from the international-calls-take-on-a-new-meaning dept.
Twenty years ago today, an invisible object circling an obscure star in the constellation Pegasus overturned everything astronomers knew about planets around other stars. No, the fallout was even bigger than that. The indirect detection of 51 Pegasi b—the first planet ever found around a star similar to the sun—revealed that they had never really known anything to begin with.
At the time, even the most adventurous minds blithely assumed that our solar system was more or less typical, a template for all the others. 51 Peg b threw a big splash of reality in their faces. The newfound world was bizarre, a Jupiter-size world skimming the surface of its star in a blistering-fast "year" that lasted just 4.2 days. Its existence ran counter to the standard theories of how planets form and evolve. It answered one big question: Yes, other planetary systems really do exist. But it raised a thousand others.
How long before we discover signals from one of those planets, and what will it mean for our civilization?
(Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday October 31 2015, @09:41PM
analyzing their atmospheres to determine if any of them have life. That will happen long before any alien broadcasts are detected.
We can't be certain just what atmospheres can support life.
We can be even less certain of when any broadcasts might be detected.
Some of these planets are as close as 13 light years. Our radio broadcasts have already reached those planets.
The biggest problem of detecting any signal from that close will be filtering out our own noise.
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(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Saturday October 31 2015, @10:47PM
We can look for atmospheric signatures that imply photosynthesis. If the technologies improve enough, we could directly image planets to look for continents, oceans, vegetation, etc.
http://www.space.com/24258-alien-planets-continents-extraterrestrial-life.html [space.com]
The next big budget space telescope launched after JWST will probably be optimized to look for life on exoplanets:
ATLAST: The Gargantuan Telescope Designed to Find Life on Other Planets [theatlantic.com]
Our options for building giant telescopes are improving. We have foldable [npr.org] spacecraft [nasa.gov] components [wikipedia.org]. Given the interest in (re)visiting the moon within the next couple of decades (by Americans, Chinese, and others), it may be possible to robotically construct a "ground" telescope on the far side of the moon. Near zero atmospheric interference, shielded from noisy EM sources on Earth, with the possibility of being built much larger than space telescopes.
Unless intelligent life is incredibly common, we won't find it within 15 light years, or 100-1000 light years. You don't necessarily need to communicate to detect alien broadcasts, although if intelligent life 15 light years away detected our broadcasts and sent a directed and powerful response, SETI would have been successful.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Funny) by deadstick on Saturday October 31 2015, @11:40PM
although if intelligent life 15 light years away detected our broadcasts and sent a directed and powerful response
If I were the alien ruler, and we detected "I Love Lucy", my response would indeed be direct and powerful...
(Score: 2) by tibman on Sunday November 01 2015, @12:06AM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Aliens_Attack [wikipedia.org]
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(Score: 2) by frojack on Sunday November 01 2015, @05:47AM
Oh, sorry, I thought we were thinking outside the box here. You were looking for life as we know it here on earth.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.