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posted by martyb on Thursday March 08 2018, @10:29PM   Printer-friendly
from the Kessler-syndrome dept.

An arXiv preprint suggests that evidence of intelligent (or trashy) life could be found by looking for space junk:

Its author, Héctor Socas-Navarro, spends most of his time at the Canary Islands Institute of Astrophysics in Spain studying the sun. But he was struck by a weird side effect of the ring of active and retired satellites circling Earth: it's a little bit opaque. And the more satellites we throw up there, the more opaque it gets. He realized that if we—or any technologically advanced aliens out there—build enough satellites, they'll eventually become dense enough to leave a faint shadow around the planet when it passes in front of a star.

And that's awfully convenient given that one of the best ways we have of spotting alien planets is by staring at their stars and waiting for tiny dips in brightness as planets pass in front of them. Essentially, Socas-Navarro's new paper proposes, if aliens have put enough satellites into orbit around their planet, we'll be able to spot the faintly opaque bubble before and after we spot the brightness dip of the planet itself.

The scale of the endeavor would be a real challenge for the aliens, however, since this idea relies on between 10 billion and one trillion satellites. "It's like building the pyramids," Avi Loeb, an astronomer at Harvard University, told New Scientist. "Each building block is easy, but putting it together is the hard engineering task."


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  • (Score: 2) by frojack on Friday March 09 2018, @07:58AM (1 child)

    by frojack (1554) on Friday March 09 2018, @07:58AM (#649885) Journal

    any technologically advanced aliens out there—build enough satellites, they'll eventually become dense enough to leave a faint shadow around the planet

    No they wouldn't. Aliens significantly more advanced than us would have learned long ago how to deorbit their space junk and recycle it.

    And no advance society is going to have billions of individuals living on space stations. We are planetary animals. Perfectly adapted to our planets.
    Advanced societies would learn to take care of their planet rather than moving onto space stations.

    If you put ALL the space junk we've ever launched on a football field it wouldn't even cover half.

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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 09 2018, @10:51AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 09 2018, @10:51AM (#649908)

    We are really only perfectly adapted to live in the African savanna. But we live in lots of other places too - so much so that most of humanity isn't actually properly adapted to live there any more.

    While any civilization with sufficient technology will no doubt have certain factions who prefer to live on planets, just as we have some people who prefer to live in the middle of nowhere and hunt for food, someone will decide to live in space if it is possible to do so. Their children will consider it home and find it completely natural. And given the disparity in living space and resources, their descendants will outnumber the planet-bound by a billion to one.