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What if aliens discover Earth, what will they realize? This study provides an answer

2023-05-15 20:51:45Kosova&Bota SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX
What if aliens discover Earth, what will they realize? This study provides an
What if aliens discover Earth, what will they realize? This study provides an answer

Natalie Sauer*

Are we alone in the Universe? It's a question that appeals to both scientists and the public. In science, the focus is on finding life elsewhere. The idea that we might be being watched by a distant alien society, however, remains within the realm of science fiction.

But if there are technological societies in the Universe, they are probably much more developed than us. After all, we have only developed industrially in the last 200 years. They may be 10 thousand years before us.

But the question is, if aliens come to Earth, what will they see?

The latest study provides some clues.

It is not the first time such a study has been conducted. But 50 years have passed since this topic was still hot. A lot has changed since the 70s, especially with cell phones. These devices and the towers that connect them have created a new techno-signature of broadband radio broadcasting.

Although 4G handsets and transmission towers have relatively low power individually (0.1-200 watts), there are so many of them – billions of phones and many millions of towers. And the accumulated radio emission from these is starting to become quite significant. But would it be visible to an alien civilization watching from afar?

Because the Earth rotates on its axis, an advanced civilization located somewhere in our galaxy will measure the radio emission from mobile towers to rise and fall in intensity as different parts of the Earth rotate.

The model is complicated by the fact that the transmission of mobile towers is usually directed towards the horizon. This means that at any given time, the towers seen rising from the Earth's horizon will contribute more to the measured signal.

An advanced civilization that makes many precise measurements of this radio wave over time can probably figure out that our planet is mostly covered by water and is divided into several large land masses. The radio wave usually comes from land masses and not from water.

They may also be able to show that while most mobile radio waves are associated with land masses, towers (and presumably their intelligent users) tend to be located along coastlines.

They would also see that cell tower networks are fairly evenly distributed across the planet. This is different from traditional radio waves, previously known as large technological signatures - in particular, radar and TV transmitters.

Our simulations show that significant contributions to the Earth's mobile flux radiation are coming from developing regions, such as Africa and Asia. This is not surprising given the importance of mobile systems in all aspects of society in developing countries.

We calculated the power emitted by the Earth – which is about 4 gigawatts in total at its peak (one GE could power about 750,000 homes for an hour). We estimated the transmission as seen from three different stars in our galaxy—HD 95735, Barnard's Star, and Alpha Centauri A.

However, we found that an alien civilization near these places would need much better telescopes than we do to detect Earth's mobile radio waves. But that would be quite possible, given that most technical civilizations are expected to be far more advanced than we are.

There are also other types of emissions they could see, such as military radar systems and deep space communications transmissions on distant spacecraft, such as the Voyager space probes. While these signals would be relatively rare events to an observing alien, they have the advantage of being extremely powerful.

What if aliens discover Earth, what will they realize? This study provides an
Radio telescope under the Milky Way

Radio techno-signatures are perhaps the defining characteristic of our own civilization's existence, at least from an alien's perspective. But an extraterrestrial species would also find leakage radiation across the entire electromagnetic spectrum (including visible light).

If we continue to increase our energy consumption at the current rate, an inevitable end product of energy use – will also be discharged into space. There it would show up as an anomalous excess in infrared wavelengths—a telltale sign of an active technical civilization.

Other techno-signatures, including industrial pollutants in Earth's atmosphere, would also be visible to aliens equipped with powerful telescopes and spectral analysis systems (which break down light into wavelengths).

On Earth, we use the Kardashev scale to rate the development of alien civilizations based on their energy use - on that scale we would appear as a developing technical civilization, not yet on the bottom scale.

And even if an alien species doesn't manage to figure all this out at the moment, they could do better very soon. We plan to extend this work to include traditional radio techno-signatures and other emerging sources of radio leakage radiation, including 5G systems, wifi, digital broadcasts and deep space communications.

Who knows, it may even be possible for aliens to decipher the complex modulation of our cellular communication systems. After all, as the Earth becomes artificially brighter at all wavelengths, the possibilities cannot be ruled out that they will detect us before we do.

*Source: The Conversation


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