We Could Find Extraterrestrial Civilizations by Their Air Pollution

[Seldom Bucket]

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...

www.universetoday.com

 

[satanboy]

What if they didn't even breathe air?

 

[Paul Hjul]

I am not sure the logic holds:

The presumption implicit in the approach is that extra-terrestrial intelligence will have a similar propensity to generate waste products manifesting as air pollution. This presumption is grounded in the viewing of humans as the bellweather for intelligence. Intelligent life could evolve quite differently. Further even assuming human air pollution producing intelligence as the marker in the 200 000 odd years of humans being around less than 10 000 of those have had air pollution, and if trends in technological innovation continue within 500 years we should have materially cleaned up. Even if we define intelligence more narrowly and exclude early biological humans the conclusion would still be that air pollution is a sign of a not particularly technology evolved civilization.

 

[Urist]

Maybe rather we'll find signs of extinct extraterrestrial civilizations by their great filter events.

 

[satanboy]

These aliens could also be so advanced that they have removed 100% of the traces of pollution.
Some scientists need to read some sci-fi, because their narrow vision is a problem.