Hairspray Could Help Us Find Advanced Alien Civilizations

And light pollution measures and energy saving says that the streetlighting we've had for a mere fraction of a galactic second (i.e. a couple of hundred years) won't be here in that same fraction again.

Hell, as it is, we try to reduce the amount of light that goes somewhere unnecessary (e.g. the sky!) or that is produced and doesn't do anything. There are already countries and cities with lighting that's dynamic based on the cars rolling over it (which means the signal is even HARDER to find, even if you knew what you were looking for).

And in terms of the stretch of a civilisation, lighting visible even from orbit, let alone the other side of the galaxy, is literally a tiny flicker that you'll only catch if you're constantly listening to EXACTLY that, in EXACTLY the right place for a few billion years.

Hell, it's hard enough to see all of Earth's artificial lighting from orbit if there is cloud cover, let alone from somewhere like where Voyager currently is, and as you got further out the inverse square law solves the problem nicely to give you a probability of anyone detecting it tending rather swiftly towards zero.

If you want to detect a civilisation, about the only sensible thing to do is ignore the planets, look at the stars. Because sources of energy that huge, that well light-up, that stable, that predictable and, with suitable technology, even harvestable (I believe it's called a Dyson sphere) are likely to be something that won't stop being a commodity for a long time and activity on them will be inherently visible (even if that's by one-day disappearing entirely).

Think to yourself. I plonk you down into the universe at an unknown point and at an unknown time since the Big Bang. I give you a billion-year-long-life (sound a lot? It's not). How do you find someone who's had the same done to them? The chances are you're not even going to be able to see each other, would never be at the right stages at the right times to communicate with each other before moving onto the "next most advanced / obvious method of communication", and even if you do by some chance talk be too far away or your communication too "out of date" to do anything useful with it.

Until you can quite literally bend space and visit other places, it's all a bit pointless to be looking because of simple physical laws. And by the time you *can* do that, it's easier to just plonk a sensor on every star system with your space bending techniques than it would be to ever listen out for them all.

We are quite literally talking about how to detect a particular mayfly of interest on an entire planet of activity. And by the time we do it, that mayfly has evolved to build its own space program and buggered off deeper into the galaxy anyway.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/FkCGyJFImX8/story01.htm

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