And at the fall of night, all I see is light…
In the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, astronomers have hunted for radio signals and ultra-short laser pulses. In a new paper, Avi Loeb (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and Edwin Turner (Princeton University) suggests a new technique for finding aliens: look for their city lights. “Looking for alien cities would be a long shot, but wouldn’t require extra resources. And if we succeed, it would change our perception of our place in the universe,” said Loeb.
The ad for the cities we discover on other planets? What ever happens there, stays there.
That’s just dumb. What if they don’t need light to navigate their environment like we do?
@1 my first thought as well. What if they were simply nocturnal? Or preferred to build shelter underground?
My first thought was that all of the planets outside of our solar system that we have ever heard about have been to dim to image directly and we find them my observing the wobbles of their suns do to gravity. So looking for unnatural lights on their surfaces doesn’t sound feasible, but perhaps I’m just mistaken.
Alternately, what if they’re light is only derived from fire? That’s the way humans lived for hundreds of thousands of years.
The reason this is NOT dumb is because it doesn’t require any new resources (as mentioned in the quoted text). We can look for alien city lights with equipment and techniques we have in place right now.
It’s an easy thing to do that we are not doing now.
It IS dumb because it DOES require new resources, as it casually mentions later in the article. Doing this requires telescopes we won’t have for a very long time. We have no capability to look at distant earth-like planets in anywhere near enough detail to see city lights.
There would be a certain sadness in actually finding proof of advanced life elsewhere. Based on physics as we understand them, it’d be like when really really old people get previously lost mail from past lovers. Thankfully, Earth is a total babe and we’ll never have to wonder what could have been.
We have no idea if intelligent life can survive for any real length of time.
Most intelligent life moved out to the suburbs during the 1970s.
@1 et al – my first thought as well – this only works if they need what we consider the “visible spectrum” though that spectrum is generated by stars, along with others (which I assume we could search for given our technology).
@8 – yes, or it could be a single lifetime in another world could be thousands or millions of solar years – our concept of time is completely terra-centric – the possibilities are quite broad
I really hope we find intelligent life on other planets within my lifetime. It would be a total game changer for all Earth politics.