City Lights Could Reveal Civilisations On Other Planets ...

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Earth’s biggest cities are visible from space at night thanks to street lighting. ET’s probably are too, say astronomers

The various pictures of Earth at night have become iconic images of humankind’s impact on the planet. The giant metropolises of Tokyo, the East and West coasts of the US and much of northernEurope light up our planet like a festive bauble.

Today, Abraham Loeb from Harvard University in Cambridge and Edwin Turner from Princeton University in New Jersey point out that its entirely reasonable for civilisations on other planets to have lit up their cities too. Any intelligent life that evolved in the light from its nearest star is likely to have artificial illumination that switches on during the hours of darkness.

 

This light will be different from natural illumination. On Earth, artificial lighting falls into two types: thermal lighting in the form of incandescent light bulbs and quantum lighting in the form of LEDs and fluorescent lights. “The spectra of artificial lights on distant objects would likely distinguish them from natural illumination sources,” say Loeb and Turner. “Artificial illumination may serve as a lamppost which signals the existence ofextraterrestrial technologies and civilizations.”

But how easy would it be to spot a city on another planet? Clearly, this light will have to be distinguished from the glare from the parent star and Loeb and Turner suggest a way to do this. Their idea is to look at the change in light from an exoplanet as it moves around its star.

Given that its orbit will be elliptical, the amount of reflected light will change with the distance from its star. But the amount of artificial light will remain constant. So the total flux from a planet with city street lighting will vary in a way that is measurably different from a planet that has no streetlights.

There’s a caveat, however. “For this signature to be detectable, the night side needs to have an artificial brightness comparable to the natural illumination of the day side,” say Loeb and Turner. That seems rather unlikely given that Earth’s night time illumination is some 100,000 times less its day time lighting.

But it’s early days for this entirely new form of SETI. Other techniques for spotting cities as they blink on and off in theextraterrestrial night will surely emerge.

There is another search that could be done closer to home. With the help of some back-of-the-envelope calculations, Loeb and Turner say that today’s best telescopes ought to be able to see the light generated by a Tokyo-sized metropolis at a distance of about 50 AU, that’s roughly the distance to the Kuiper belt.

So if there are any cities out there, we ought to be able to see them now. “Artificially-lit Kuiper Belt objects might have originated from civilizations near other stars,” say Loeb and Turner who suggest they could have been ejected from their own systems and ended up here. They may even have passed near Earth on their way through the Solar System before the age of telescopes.

For that reason, they argue it’s worth studying the spectra from Kuiper belt objects, just in case.

Perhaps. Either way, Loeb and Turner have dreamt up an exciting new take on the search for extra terrestrial intelligence.

And not a moment too soon. SETI badly needs an injection of new ideas. Earth’s radio signature has been in dramatic decline as communications have switched from the airwaves to fibre optics. This has begun to pull the metaphorical rug from the radio-based rational for SETI.

But with exoplanets being discovered by the bucket-load, it’s becoming increasingly clear that ET civilisations could reveal themselves in other ways.

And as Loeb and Turner point out, light pollution seems as promising a signature to search for as any other.

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Does China Want To Own The Moon?

• Within about 15 years, Chinacould have a permanent presence on the moon, and be laying claim to its resources.
• There may not be anything the United States, hobbled by debt and politically polarized, can do to stop China.

By the time U.S. astronauts return to the moon they may need permission to touch down — from China, which is laying the groundwork for a lunar land grab, says long-time space advocate and entrepreneur Robert Bigelow.

Owning the moon is the first step in a game Bigelow, founder of Nevada-based Bigelow Aerospace, calls “Solar System Monopoly.”

The only flags planted into the lunar regolith by humans was done by U.S. astronauts from the Apollo Program. Will China be next? NASA (edit by Discovery News/Ian O'Neill)

“This will characterize the 21st and 22nd centuries and beyond. If we ignore this, it will be at our extreme peril,” Bigelow said at the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight under way this week in Las Cruces, N.M.

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The way Bigelow sees it, China, which has no debt, cash reserves of $3 trillion, technical skills, a long-term strategy and strong national support, will lay claim to raw materials on the moon in about 15 years.

The land grab will occur despite an international treaty barring ownership of extraterrestrial bodies, concludes Bigelow, who points out that China’s growing global economic influence will make it less likely other countries will object to its lunar expansion.

“This isn’t going to start World War III,” Bigelow said.

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There’s several reasons why China might want the moon, not the least of which is its trove of mineral resources that include water and helium-3, a potential fuel for fusion energy reactors. Laying claim to the moon also would have a powerful psychological impact, displacing America’s Apollo forays and catapulting China’s international status in one fell swoop.

“Nothing else China could possibly do in the next 15 years would cause as great a benefit for China,” Bigelow said.

With the United States straddled by debt and political gridlock, Bigelow thinks the first round of the game is already lost. But there’s still time to give China a run for its money on Mars.

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“Hopefully this will produce the fear factor necessary to motivate Americans,” Bigelow said.

China, which is not a member of the International Space Station program, last month launched a test module for its own outpost in orbit. A capsule to robotically dock at the module is scheduled to be launched in November. That will be followed by human missions in 2012.

In addition to a small space station, China has announced plans for a lunar base by 2020.

NEWS: China Starts Work on Its Own Space Hangout

“They’re serious about what they’re doing,” said Mark Sirangelo, who oversees Sierra Nevada Corp., one of several firms working to develop commercial passenger spaceships for NASA and other users.

“Not only do they have a lot of people and a lot of money focused in on it, but they have a lot of willpower. I think that’s one of the things that we in this country are lacking a little bit right now, the willpower to do the necessary things to make us successful in space.”

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Nuclear Explosion On Mars?

Did an atomic explosion decimate Mars long ago?

According to a recent press release, a new theory claims to explain how the planet Mars acquired its red color and its tortured, barren, and desiccated landscape.

According to the release, “About 180 million years ago, a planet-shattering yet naturally occurring nuclear reaction may have wiped out everything on Mars, sending a shockwave that turned the planet into dry sand.”

Why does the planet appear to have been devastated from pole to pole? Dr. John Brandenburg, co-author of “Dead Mars, Dying Earth,” suggests that an immensenuclear explosion—albeit a natural one—destroyed Mars almost 200 million years ago.

Portion of the Mare Acidalium quadrangle on Mars. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Brandenburg’s theory is based on two regions of increased radiation that appear to have been caused by processes that once took place here on Earth, as well. In Franceville, Gabon, scientists noticed that there was an unexpected three-thousandth of a percent difference between expected values of uranium 235 compared to uranium 238 in their spectrographic analyses of rock samples.

It was suggested that two billion years ago, a self-sustaining chain reaction began in some mineral deposits containing uranium 235 in concentrations over three percent. Particular isotopes of xenon gas in the uranium deposits in the “Oklo reactor” region of Gabon are said to indicate that a natural nuclear reaction burned for thousands of years until the fissile uranium was exhausted.

Brandenburg says that the “natural explosion” on Mars was more like a blast and not a reactor. The million megaton atomic detonation is supposed to have scattered radioactive dust from Mare Acidalium all over the planet. The increased detection of xenon 129 isotope radiation is supposed to confirm the connection between Gabon and Mars. Several factors in both the Gabon and Mare Acidalium theories might lend themselves to other explanations when the time of both observations is adjusted. Rather than 200 million, or two billion years, what if both anomalies were created in the same more recent events?

But what about electric discharge in an earlier, highly electrified phase of Solar System history? The truth is that the Martian terrain presents definitive evidence of electric arcing to the surface in a global re-sculpting of the planet. Much of theevidence involves enigmatic dendritic ridge systems or“Lichtenberg Figures.” We see this sharply carved relief along hundreds of miles of the gigantic Valles Marineris. Identical morphologies appear on both the “caldera” walls of Olympus Mons and its miles-high scarp. The same formations stand out on great mesa cliffs, along the walls of extensive rilles, and even on the rims of huge craters. These unique configurations cry out for a common explanation, but conventional geology has nothing to offer. As documented in the videopresentation, “The Lightning-Scarred Planet Mars,” laboratory experiments readily produce the forms with electric discharge.

Burned and blasted craters, along with piles of scorched dust cover almost an entire hemisphere of Mars. Gigantic trenches across its scarred face could indicate that lightning thousands or millions of times more energetic than we know today devastated Mars.

As discussed exhaustively on these pages, countless “anomalous” geologic features on Mars have eluded any conventional explanation. From the great trench Valles Marineris, to the so-called “volcano” Olympus Mons, to the vast (900 km) crater in Argyre Planitia, to the strangely terraced mounds in Arabia Terra, as well as both Martian poles, the planet’s surface offers what could well be the most promising laboratory in thesolar system for testing electric discharge explanation of planetary surface. In other articles on this site, we’ve discussed the experiments of Dr. C.J. Ransom, who replicated the hematite spherules (“blueberries”) that litter the Martian landscape by blasting a bed of hematite with an electric arc.

We’ve also noted evidence of the electric-discharge transmutation of elements, which would mean that isotopic ratios, no matter which elements are considered, cannot be used to prove or disprove the timeframe of any radiative emissions.

Past Pictures of the Day deal with geological formations all over the world and with craters exceeding 100 kilometers in diameter. In some cases, there are glass spherules or large chunks of pure silica lying in broken pieces all over the area. What could account for kilometers long fields of broken glass shards like those in Egypt or large sheets of “Darwin glass” from Australia? Surely the most reasonable explanation based on laboratory experiments, not wild theoretical leaps, is provided by planetary-scale cosmic thunderbolts, melting and fusing the soils into glass. Perhaps the timeframe will be difficult to establish so long after the events, but the question of cause can no longer be avoided..

Intense ionizing radiation most likely bombarded Earth and Mars at some time in the recent past. Rather than nuclear reactors in the ground it was electricity from space that left its imprint.

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