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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 09 2018, @10:44AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 09 2018, @10:44AM (#649907)

    We find footprints and even eggshells pretty regularly... Surely a technological civilization would leave artifacts more durable than that. Metal might corrode, but ceramic and glass should last over geological timescales, not to mention stone tools or fossilized bone tools, or the "footprints" of machinery. Now, if they were just sentient but only used that ability for social interaction had no technology, then of course we could only infer that if we found a skull.

  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday March 09 2018, @12:00PM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Friday March 09 2018, @12:00PM (#649915) Journal

    The point is, they were so intelligent that they eventually came to the conclusion that littering the planet is a bad idea, so they collected all the artefacts in middle America, where they then destroyed them with a meteorite they directed towards earth for that purpose.

    Unfortunately they were still not intelligent enough to recognize the big error in their calculation, which led them to choose a much too big meteorite, causing their own extinction. ;-)

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
  • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Friday March 09 2018, @04:54PM

    We find footprints and even eggshells pretty regularly... Surely a technological civilization would leave artifacts more durable than that. Metal might corrode, but ceramic and glass should last over geological timescales, not to mention stone tools or fossilized bone tools, or the "footprints" of machinery. Now, if they were just sentient but only used that ability for social interaction had no technology, then of course we could only infer that if we found a skull.

    Volcanism [wikipedia.org] (think the Siberian traps), plate tectonics, massive space rocks, and possibly even a large thermonuclear exchange could certainly obliterate just about any trace of a civilization over such long time scales.

    Any of the major mass extinctions [worldatlas.com] (and conceivably others less massive) could have been caused by many things, even devastating nuclear exchanges. And over the time scales we're talking about (aside from, possibly, the Cretaceous), we'd likely be unable to identify such events.

    Glass? Ceramics? Metal works? Given the geological processes at work, it's entirely possible (especially if a technological civilizations was concentrated on coastlines) that the ruins of such a civilization would be completely recycled via tectonic plate movements, with all evidence having been cycled through the Earth's mantle.

    I'm not saying that such a thing happened, I'm merely suggesting that it could have, illustrating the difficulty in identifying the remains of a another hypothetical civilization around another star. Especially given the even longer time scales (10 billion years?) and vast distances involved.

    Does that mean I think we shouldn't try? No. On the contrary, I think we should try to gather as much information about our universe as possible. Discovering such debris would be exciting, if incredibly unlikely.

    --
    No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr