Lights of alien worlds
Posted on November 4, 2011 by Ashley Corbion .
Since the search for extraterrestrial intelligence started, scientists have been “listening” to stars, looking for artificial radio emissions from other planets. While we keep searching for such signals, there may as well be other ways to detect alien civilizations. Light itself may in the future become an efficient way to find another inhabited and civilized world.
Researchers at SETI are using radio signals in order to detect other possible civilizations elsewhere in the Galaxy for various reasons, the main one being our own civilization: we are emitting considerable amounts of electromagnetic radiation as a byproduct of communications, and many radio frequencies penetrate the atmosphere quite easily.
However, you might argue that this doesn’t mean any other civilization would do the same, especially considering that technology changes quickly, and that our own emissions are constantly decreasing. Also, any signal would have to be pretty strong to be detectable.
Abraham Loeb of Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and Edwin Turner of Princeton University have now suggested a new way for detecting alien civilization, and it is pretty simple: we should look for their city lights. So if it is that simple, why aren’t we already doing it? The only limitation is technology: to glimpse the light of alien cities, researchers would have to be able to distinguish it from the glare of their parent star. According to the two scientists, the slight change in light from an exoplanet as it moves around its star should be detectable. Indeed, an inhabited exoplanet with city lighting would emit more light than one without artificial lighting during a dark phase (when orbiting its star the planet would go through phases similar to those of our Moon).
With our current technology, the team estimates that we should be able to detect a Tokyo-sized metropolis on Pluto. Obviously, it’s very unlikely that there is any alien civilization out there or anywhere in the Kuiper Belt (the region in which Pluto is orbiting the Sun). However, by the time the first Earth-like exoplanets are found, our technology will have improved and should be able to detect the artificial lights of potential nearby Earth twins.
Although this technique also relies on the assumption that any alien civilization would use Earth-like technologies, it seems rather difficult to avoid artificial lighting, unlike radio signals. And that’s why I personally hope to see such research being done in the near future.
A computer chip that emulates the human brain – and might one day replace it
Your brain is home to around 100 billion neurons, all of which are perpetually establishing and breaking connections, known as synapses, with other neurons. There are trillions of these connections throughout your brain helping orchestrate everything from movement, to learning, to establishing and recalling memories.
But we still don’t understand how all the connections between those neurons work. Now researchers at MIT and Harvard have created a new computer chip model that could change that in a big way.
Apollo 12: Self-Portrait
Credit: Charles Conrad, Apollo 12, NASA
In November of 1969, Apollo 12 astronaut-photographer Charles “Pete” Conrad recorded this masterpiece while documenting colleague Alan Bean’s lunar soil collection activities on the Oceanus Procellarum.
Para las personas el dinero es como un tipo de Dios… Por que la gente las personas son así, por que le sacan el cuerpo ya así sea por su buena situación economica ósea que sea rico o que tenga dinero, y también por que se creen que son mas que los demás por ciertas cosas que ellos plantean en su subconsciente aunque lo que estén pensando no lo sean… Terrible pero cierto…J.I.T.C
