Seldom Bucket
Well-Known Member
Upcoming telescopes will give us more power to search for biosignatures on all the exoplanets we’ve found. Much of the biosignature conversation is centred on biogenic chemistry, such as atmospheric gases produced by simple, single-celled creatures. But what if we want to search for technological civilizations that might be out there? Could we find them by searching for their air pollution?
If a distant civilization was giving our planet a cursory glance in its own survey of alien worlds and technosignatures, they couldn’t help but notice our air pollution.
Could we turn the tables on them?
Air pollution as a technosignature isn’t a brand new idea. A new paper looks at one specific chemical pollutant that is both biogenic and anthropogenic on Earth: NO2, or nitrogen dioxide. The authors say that nitrogen dioxide could be detected as a technosignature on an Earth-like planet orbiting a Sun-like star with a 15-meter (49 ft) telescope similar to NASA’s proposed Large UV/Optical/IR Surveyor (LUVOIR). However, it would take several hundred hours of observation time.
We Could Find Extraterrestrial Civilizations by Their Air Pollution
Upcoming telescopes will give us more power to search for biosignatures on all the exoplanets we’ve found. Much of the biosignature conversation is centred on biogenic chemistry, such as atmospheric gases produced by simple, single-celled creatures. But what if we want to search for...
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