What Would Alien Telescopes See If They Looked at Earth?

how wonderful person this is Anton and today we're going to be discussing a slight variation on the iconic Fermi Paradox the Paradox that asks the question of where is everyone why is it that we haven't found any advanced extraterrestrial intelligence as of today but in this case the scientist behind the recent paper wanted to ask the opposite question if there is an advanced civilization what exactly

can find that paper in the description below and so this new paper decided to do something really similar but specifically focusing on advances in Technologies and especially advances in telecommunication and how the radio transmissions on the planet changed over time I know the humanity has only emerged as an industrial civilization in the last 200 years the main assumption here is that other civilizations might follow a

similar path but might also be a lot more advanced being able to hear us and possibly even see us using more Advanced Techniques and so for example could they detect our radio transmissions and would they be able to tell that there's someone intelligent living on the planet and the Intriguing main Discovery coming from this paper is actually in regards to how much the radio Transmissions changed

in the last 5 decades turns out the radio transmissions on the planet have improved so much that we're now much more quiet than we used to be back in the 70s and that's because back in the days the most powerful radio Transmissions usually came from various TV towers which usually emitted huge amounts of radio Transmissions all from one single spot but in the last couple of

decades everything switched to digital mode and the majority of Transmissions usually happen via satellite communication and involving various transmitting towers around the planet and these towers often produce very low power individually with maximum of about 200 Watts but because there are so many of them and because they are generally concentrated in certain regions around certain cities in some locations they actually do emit quite a lot

of radio frequencies and if you were to combine all of these towers into one large transmitter it would emit approximately 4 gigawatts of power which is surprisingly quite a lot but they are more or less distributed evenly across the planet which basically suggests that overall the total radio frequencies coming from planet Earth have sort of decreased in the last few decades the planet has become a

little bit more silent but to make this more scientific the scientists behind his paper used an open database known as open cell ID that more or less maps all of the towers across various regions creating this really cool map of tower distribution across the planet with certain regions such as Lisbon and Portugal shown in more detail and here's actually an example from Africa where you can

actually correlate the number of towers with the overall level of development and so there are quite a few interesting discoveries for example because Earth rotates and because the radio tower is usually transmitted toward the Horizon the overall emissions would form this unusual pattern repeating every 24 hours and that's because certain locations will have a lot more Towers such as various cities whereas locations in the oceans

would have none and so as the signals are transmitted away from planet Earth toward the Horizon the overall emissions would peak in power depending on the total number of towers and in theory this will be enough for whatever alien species out there to actually start figuring out what's happening here because these are artificial frequencies with very specific repetitions they would start making assumptions that this is

probably coming from Advanced life and because these repeat every 24 hours they would make an assumption that this is a spinning Planet but the 24 day cycle they would also start making assumptions that there are certain regions that have a lot more emissions and most particular regions might even correlate to something else such as other technical signatures visible from outer space Maybe Heat traps or light

Maps produced by cities at night and intriguingly they discovered that there are few areas on the planet that produce the most the most heat the most emissions and the most radio frequencies the biggest amount was produced by the east coast of China That's where a lot of population in China lives and that's where a lot of cell towers are located as well along with a lot

of industrial activity and even though this is distributed pretty equally today in the past the radio towers were much more concentrated and essentially produced these Peak emissions from very specific locations such as Capital Cities but they don't do that anymore and so the actual radio emissions are a lot more spread out now and overall are much more difficult to detect but would anyone be able to

hear any of this coming from planet Earth well analyzing nearby stars and analyzing the overall emissions the answer seems to be no but that's assuming that the alien species have something that's more or less similar to what we have on planet Earth so basically these very large radio dishes able to detect and trans submit various messages but in theory they could have something a lot more

powerful and also something way more sensitive in that case if they're able to produce something that's size of the planet there is a chance they might hear us from a few light years away but they would still have to be relatively close anything past 100 light years and we sort of become invisible and I guess more intriguingly we're becoming more and more invisible because of the

overall efficiency of radio Transmissions the 5G network is now even more efficient than 4G with all this becoming more and more power efficient over time and even though there are different satellites and satellite communication including thousands of Starling satellites the overall power emit is still pretty low but they might be able to hear military communication mostly because it uses much more powerful emitters or direct communication

with probes like the Voyager which relies on extremely powerful Ryu missions but these happen very rarely so uni by luck can anyone actually hear them but even though radio missions might not be detectable as other emissions are for example excess heat or excess infrared radiation or various types of pollutants that can only be produced through artificial means and unlike radio Transmissions that are becoming more efficient

and are decreasing in power in time the pollutants and the overall heat are actually increasing and so papers have actually explored things like nitrogen dioxide which usually breaks down pretty quickly because of sunlight as a potential techno signature because that's what we have on planet Earth as well combined with things like CFCs which are usually Industrial in nature it would indicate to whoever is looking at

the planet then there is something industrial going on on the surface of this unusual Planet but even here we have to be a little bit more careful because turns out some of these signatures such as a lot of complex chemicals that could be associated with industrial civilization are even detectable in the atmosphere of Titan and these are neural chemicals currently have no explanation but nobody really

thinks it's from industrial civilization as much as some really complex chemistry okay going on on the surface of Titan we'll probably learn more about this once NASA launches the dragonfly Mission that's going to be visiting and exploring this beautiful moon whereas when it comes to various heat detections or detecting excess infrared light turns out that in most cases large wildfires such as the ones in Western

Australia completely overshadow anything else visible from the planet so even though we do produce excess heat the one that's visible from outer space would actually be natural and not industrial which in essence means that even with chemical or light based techno signatures currently the Earth is more or less invisible and although our planet is becoming artificially brighter in all wavelengths it's very unlikely that anybody can

detect it even with some of the most powerful telescopes out there and as our radio Transmissions improve in power efficiency will basically become completely invisible and I guess more ironically we were most visible three to four decades ago at this point even though we produce more radio light on average it's just a lot more spread out and a lot more difficult to detect and according to

the scientists behind this paper even within 10 light years away from us at the moment we're practically invisible and so that's maybe one potential answer to the former Paradox once again and why we're not actually hearing anything from anyone maybe over time the species become so efficient in their transmission then it's impossible to tell it apart from background radiation but we're not going to know more

until feature studies or until future discoveries using more advanced telescopes and so until then check out other videos on firmware Paradox in the description below thank you for watching subscribe share this with someone about rainbow space and Sciences come back tomorrow to learn something else and maybe support you on patreon by Joe Montana membership or by anyone full version t-shirt you can find in the description

stay wonderful see you tomorrow and as always bye [Music] [Music] thank you thank you