In a paper published in the latest issue of the esteemed journal Acta Astronautica, experts from the Pennsylvania State University say that alien civilizations may detect Earth based on its changing climate. When this happens, we may be in a world of trouble.Highly-advanced, highly-intelligent alien lifeforms may not take too kindly to the fact that we are destroying our planet. By not acting on available evidence about the nature of global warming and climate change, we are directly destroying the very ecosystem that supports us.
If we assume an extraterrestrial civilization that is wise and intelligent, then we may also assume that it would have reached a degree of complexity ion thinking that enables it to see the errors in our ways. Some members of our species are there, but most are lagging behind.
In all fairness, there is literally no way of knowing how contact with an alien civilization would pan out, but analysts have been proposing scenarios for many years. The new paper the Penn State team published is meant to be a list of such scenarios.
Though the work contains several such possibilities, one captured the attention of scientists in particular. In this scenarios, changes in our planet's spectral signature – as determined by temperature – give away our location to alien civilizations.
Earth's spectral signature is generated by light bounced back into space by the atmosphere and the surface of the planet itself. Adding greenhouse gases such as methane and carbon dioxide (CO2) modifies this signature, indicating that something is out of the ordinary.
At the same time, aliens may very well infer a lot of things about our nature as a species, such as our uncontrollable appetite for exploiting natural resources, other species and our planet as a whole. In such a scenario, who could blame them for seeing us as a threat?
“If [they] doubt that our course can be changed, then they may seek to preemptively destroy our civilization in order to protect other civilizations from us,” the Penn State team explains. The group included scientists Shawn Domagal-Goldman and Seth Baum.
“This is a highly unlikely scenario. We're not really saying this is going to happen, but it's a possibility. The motivation for explaining this possibility is that we are doing this technology already. We ar looking at other planets and their spectral signatures,” adds Jacob Haqq-Misra.
The expert holds an appointment as a meteorologist and astrobiologist at Penn State, and is also a coauthor of the journal entry,
Space reports. He adds that our capabilities for observing spectral signature shifts currently extends for just 200 light-years in all direction.
But an alien civilization capable of space travel would undoubtedly have access to technologies that would enable it to see much, much further than that. “How far you can see depends on how big your telescope is. So this is a realistic scenario: What if ET looked at Earth?” Haqq-Misra concludes.
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