#spaceforce
It's safe to assume that any aliens who travel to our solar system will be so much more advanced than us that there's literally nothing we could do to repel them if they were aggressors. We can only hope they're friendly.
Aliens on 1k nearby stars could see us, new study suggests
11–20 of 226 posts
Re: Aliens on 1k nearby stars could see us, new study suggests
#12Can WE detect life on Earth from far away?
Depends on how far and exactly where we are in relation to the earth sun system.
Re: Aliens on 1k nearby stars could see us, new study suggests
#13> the zone where Earth's transit is visible gets smaller as you get closer to our solar system I’m trying to imagine why that is but cannot.
Let’s say that you need to be within, say, 1 degree of the ecliptic. The height of that ring is much greater at 100 ly than at 1 ly, meaning more space for stars.
Re: Aliens on 1k nearby stars could see us, new study suggests
#14Is this worth disabling adblocker, pretty please? :(
Re: Aliens on 1k nearby stars could see us, new study suggests
#15Is this worth disabling adblocker, pretty please? :(
Nothing is. But I have uBlock Origin, I'm not getting stopped.
Re: Aliens on 1k nearby stars could see us, new study suggests
#16Seems like the only way for us to prove that they can see us is for us to see them first.
And, it’s likely we will never see their planets from earth while they can see ours.
Re: Aliens on 1k nearby stars could see us, new study suggests
#17The dark forest theory lives!
Unfortunately, yes. The first thing we’re going to do as soon as we fine intelligent alien life is figure out how to kill it. And sadly we’ll have to assume they’re doing the same. An no, settling Mars won’t help. If someone / something can launch an interstellar attack it can certainly attack more than one planet and moon.
I have a far more charitable theory. The vast majority of human and alien life would want to be friends (or at least just leave their neighbors alone). It’s the elites who desire to destroy each other.
I also have a less charitable theory: intelligent life just doesn’t exist. A thousand years from now we will have met dozens of sentient species, but the search for intelligent life continues :P
Re: Aliens on 1k nearby stars could see us, new study suggests
#18Can WE detect life on Earth from far away?
This very instant? I suspect not well. But conceptually? Yes. If we made a space based telescope that could do IR-visible-UV spectroscopy with decent resolution/sensitivity we would be able to get some information about the chemical make up of the gasses on planets transiting their stars.
Much like the kerfluffle about phosphine on Venus, there are some compounds you just wouldn't expect from strictly geologic processes. Molecular oxygen comes to mind, but also some complicated shortish life time compounds would imply industry maybe. If we had /really/ good sensors we might even be able to spot the isotopic differences, it's been awhile since I've looked into the capacity for spectroscopy, but since the masses are different, the vibrational modes should be different, resulting in different spectra. We could conceivably spot if weird isotope distributions were in their environment, if it differed wildly enough from their suns make up you might be able to make the case that weird non-geologic nuclear reactions were taking place.
The reason the astronomy community is excited about the James Web Space Telescope is that it can do a few of these investigations.
Re: Aliens on 1k nearby stars could see us, new study suggests
#19Is this worth disabling adblocker, pretty please? :(
Disabling JavaScript works and doesn't break anything.
Re: Aliens on 1k nearby stars could see us, new study suggests
#20What's staggering to me is that with the new Voyager discoveries lately it feels like we're a bunch of stellar savages who just managed to release a buoy far enough into the ocean to feel the currents. Let alone recognize another savage on a different continent who might be doing the same experiment.
It may be even worse, that different continent is on a different planet.
Space(time) is absolutely, mind-boggling massive. Everyone knows it's big but it hard to comprehend how big and why there could be many alien civilizations out there capable of broadcasting or detecting but never intersect in any way because the detection windows of any 2 civilizations don't line up.
The Milky Way alone is ~150000-200000 light years across. Humans have been civilized for only some tens of thousands of years, and capable of sending and receiving signals for a mere century. Imagine that even at the speed of light the entire history of civilized life on Earth might come and go many times before something reaches us, or before the probe comes back.
There's no Earth-bound or common sense analogy that can convey this kind of vastness and emptiness.