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“Most promising signs yet” of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System

(www.skyatnightmagazine.com)
417 points fuidani | 1 comments | 17 Apr 25 08:02 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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seanhunter ◴[17 Apr 25 08:59 UTC] No.43714467[source]▶
Firstly that is completely badass science. The idea that you can use observations to detect the chemical composition of an exoplanet millions of kilometres away is an absolute triumph of the work of thousands of people over hundreds of years. Really amazing and deeply humbling to me.

Secondly, my prior was always that life existed outside of earth. It just seems so unlikely that we are somehow that special. If life developed here I always felt it overwhelmingly likely that it developed elsewhere too given how incredibly unfathomably vast the universe is.

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ta8645 ◴[17 Apr 25 09:20 UTC] No.43714565[source]▶
If life is very common in the universe, then that is probably bad news for us. It means that civilizations should exist that are millions of years more technologically advanced than us; and should be leaving telltale signatures across the sky that we'd likely have detected by now. And the absence of those signs would be relatively strong evidence that life, while common, isn't long-lived. Suggesting that our demise too, will come before too long.

If, on the other hand, life is relatively rare, or we're the sole example, our future can't be statistically estimated that way.

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Philip-J-Fry ◴[17 Apr 25 09:31 UTC] No.43714624[source]▶
Say another human-like civilisation existed and was more technologically advanced, what sort of tell-tale signs do you expect to see?
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ta8645 ◴[17 Apr 25 09:42 UTC] No.43714689{3}[source]▶
Scientists use the term "technosignatures", which you can google for more info. But broadly: radio signals, infrared from megastructures, optical signals like laser pulses. We haven't put a huge amount of effort in searching for such signatures, but there has been some.
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1. floatrock ◴[17 Apr 25 13:44 UTC] No.43716743{4}[source]▶
Another possibility is we're looking for the wrong techno signatures, or just haven't conceived what the technosignatures for a 10,000-year technologically advanced civilization are.

We've been a techno-civ for what? Maybe only 200-ish years? Our paradigm is gobble up all the energy and grow at all costs. So extrapolate that out, and the logical conclusion is a dyson megasphere that radiates all over the infrared.

But then again, that paradigm is careening us towards an environmental and ecosystem collapse: the hunger for infinite growth is warming our climate, it's unclear whether our nuclear-armed social structures can handle the coming disruptions and migrations, and if we don't kill ourselves, unclear how big a population all the environmental degradation and pollution can support.

So we can project our cute 200-year-old patterns out to a maybe-discoverable 10,000-year civilization driven by the same motivations and flows, but those extrapolations quickly run up against some pretty existential pragmatic threats.

Maybe the answer is we aren't seeing any of the technosignatures because the techonsignatures on the other side of the Great Filter look very different from the ones we conceive of now.