What would the Earth look like to an alien civilization located light years away? A team of researchers from Mauritius and Manchester University has used crowd-sourced data to simulate radio leakage from mobile towers and predict what an alien civilization might detect from various nearby stars, including Barnard’s star, six light years away from Earth. Ramiro Saide, currently an intern at the SETI Institute’s Hat Creek Radio Observatory and M.Phils. student at the University of Mauritius, generated models displaying the radio power that these civilizations would receive as the Earth rotates and the towers rise and set. Saide believes that unless an alien civilization is much more advanced than ours, they would have difficulty detecting the current levels of mobile tower radio leakage from Earth. However, the team suggests that some technical civilizations are likely to have much more sensitive receiving systems than we do, and the detectability of our mobile systems will increase substantially as we move to much more powerful broadband systems. (https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/522/2/2393/7028804).
Saide is also excited by the fact that his simulations show that the Earth’s mobile radio signature includes a substantial contribution from developing countries, including Africa. The team is eager to extend their research to include other contributors to the Earth’s radio leakage signature. The next step is to include powerful civilian and military radars, new digital broadcast systems, Wi-Fi networks, individual mobile handsets and the swarm of satellite constellations now being launched into low Earth orbit, such as Elon Musk’s Starlink system. The Earth is already anomalously bright in the radio part of the spectrum; if the trend continues, we could become readily detectable by any advanced civilization with the right technology.”
“This work is a superb example of how a detailed analysis of the properties of human technology (the “anthropogenic technosphere”) can be leveraged toward developing exciting, novel strategies for detecting extraterrestrial technologies,” said Allen Telescope Array Project Scientist Dr. Wael Farah. “We look forward to using the unique instrumentation capabilities and scheduling flexibility of the Allen Telescope Array, paired with our growing knowledge of nearby exoplanet systems, to undertake new searches based on these strategies.”
AR #82
The Downside of ET Contact
by J. Douglas Kenyon
