An alien civilization facing an ice age could intentionally release powerful greenhouse gases into their atmosphere. We could detect them.
This artist's illustration shows a hypothetical Earth-like inhabited planet being terraformed with artificial greenhouse gases. We could detect these chemicals with infrared spectroscopy. Image Credit: Sohail Wasif, UC Riverside/Schwieterman et al. 2024
“For us, these gases are bad because we don’t want to increase warming. But they’d be good for a civilization that perhaps wanted to forestall an impending ice age or terraform an otherwise-uninhabitable planet in their system, as humans have proposed for Mars,” said UCR astrobiologist and lead author Edward Schwieterman.
“If another civilization had an oxygen-rich atmosphere, they’d also have an ozone layer they’d want to protect,” Schwieterman said. “CFCs would be broken apart in the ozone layer even as they catalyzed its destruction.” This artist’s illustration shows the exoplanet TRAPPIST-1f, a potentially rocky Super-Earth orbiting in a red dwarf’s habitable zone. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
One desirable aspect of the search for these technosignature GHGs is that astronomers can find them as part of a general effort to study atmospheres. “Our thought experiment shows how powerful our next-generation telescopes will be. We are the first generation in history that has the technology to systematically look for life and intelligence in our galactic neighborhood,” said Angerhausen.and its resulting qualitative MIR transmission and emission spectra. Image Credit: Sohail Wasif, UC Riverside/Schwieterman et al. 2024.
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