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JWST reveals its first direct image discovery of an exoplanet

(www.smithsonianmag.com)
342 points divbzero | 4 comments | 27 Jun 25 17:44 UTC | HN request time: 0.629s | source
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timmg ◴[27 Jun 25 21:42 UTC] No.44400508[source]▶
How cool would it be to directly image artificial light on the "dark side" of a planet (like all the photos you see of lights on earth at night)?

I mean, even if there is life it's like 1 in a gazillion. But you could imagine some ML looking through all of its images to find planets, etc.

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1. ripped_britches ◴[27 Jun 25 22:25 UTC] No.44400836[source]▶
Or imagine another civilization looking at our lights with their telescope
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2. deadbabe ◴[27 Jun 25 23:54 UTC] No.44401351[source]▶
And imagine that the only reason, the ONLY reason, they haven’t completely blown us away, is because our planet happens to be one of the very rare planets where the ratio of the size of our moon and earth is in such a way that you can witness a total solar eclipse as a black hole in the sky once a year, and they would like to witness this event someday.
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3. krapp ◴[28 Jun 25 00:09 UTC] No.44401410[source]▶
That's no reason not to blow us away, eclipses still work if there are no annoying humans around to see them.
4. qw ◴[28 Jun 25 12:14 UTC] No.44404132[source]▶
What if FTL is not possible? In that case the attack will take a long time to reach us, and in the meantime we will be much more advanced technologically and could potentially defend ourselves.

In sci-fi we see warp drives, worm hole travel, phasers, photon torpedos and energy shields around ships. But what if none of that is possible? In that case, we might even have the technology to defend ourselves today if we manage to detect the attack in time.

It's a huge risk for a civilization to attack us. Even if they have capabilities that are beyond our technology, there might still be limitations based on the laws of physics. And if they attack us, they risk a response.