14 DAY TRIAL // Seth Shostak, the chief astronomer at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute, says that our planet is leaving behind a massive trail of electronic signals that alien civilizations could detect even if we want them to or not.
The trail is produced by all our electromagnetic communications, such as for example radio, cell phone and TV signals, among others. There is no feasible way of containing them in Earth's atmosphere, so a large portion of them escape out into space.
They spread extremely fast through microgravity. By now, the first of them may have reached distances as high as 50 light-years away from our planet, with all the other lagging closely behind. If our goal was to stay hidden from other potential races, then we would have done a lousy job at it.
Famous physicist Stephen Hawking said last year that we shouldn't be so keen to go out into space and meet aliens, since the latter could have nefarious plans in store for us. But his warning doesn't matter much now. If aliens mastered space technology, they can surely picky up a radio signal.
“To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational. The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like,” Hawking said, quoted by Daily Galaxy.
He added that extraterrestrials “would be only limited by how much power they could harness and control, and that could be far more than we might first imagine […] Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach, he said.
“I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet […] If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans,” he concluded.
One aspect of any alien culture experts seem to agree upon is that the theory of evolution through natural selection and the principle proclaiming the survival of the fittest will most likely apply to extraterrestrials, one way or another.
“Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is the only workable explanation that has ever been proposed for the remarkable fact of our own existence, indeed the existence of all life wherever it may turn up in the Universe,” expert John Maynard Smith says.
“It is the only known explanation for the rich diversity of animals, pants, fungi and bacteria,” he adds.
Now that we know our planet is leaving behind a calling card of sorts, we may begin to make preparations that would safeguard from any hostile civilizations. Mathematical studies conducted as of late all indicate that there is a significant chance life exists elsewhere in the Universe as well.