In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript. An illustration of Earth from space illuminated by the Sun. Stars with a past or future view of Earth as a transiting exoplanet appear brightened. Astronomers have pinpointed 2, stars from which, in the not-too-distant past or future, Earth could be detected transiting the face of the Sun. If there are aliens on planets around those stars with at least a similar level of technological advancement to ours, then they would theoretically be able to spot us L.
Kaltenegger and J. Faherty Nature , —; The work offers a new way of thinking about the search for extraterrestrial life, says Lisa Kaltenegger, an astronomer at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who led the analysis. Those aliens would be the natural choice for Earthlings to look for, say the scientists — because they could have already had a chance to spot us, and thus might be primed to receive communications from Earth.
Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue. See Subscription Options. Go Paperless with Digital. This is an opinion and analysis article. Get smart. Sign up for our email newsletter. Sign Up. Popular culture has given us lots of ideas of what extraterrestrials might look like, behave, and interact with us. Mostly by killing us, though occasionally by phoning home. But it turns out a lot of serious scientists have thought about it, too.
Different species independently evolve in similar patterns, Morris argued in The Runes of Evolution , and would likely do the same on other planets. Popular culture has extraterrestrials stepping off spacecraft onto Earth. This is not too unusual. The pressure of solar radiation or gas or particles driven out as an object warms up close to the Sun can give extra force, and we see this with comets all the time.
Experts on comets and the solar system have explored various explanations for this. Given this was a small, dark object passing us very quickly before disappearing, the images we were able to get were not wonderful, and so it is difficult to be sure.
He may or may not be right, and there is no way of proving or disproving this idea. But claims like this, especially from experienced scientists are disliked by the scientific community for many reasons. If we decide that anything slightly odd that we do not understand completely in astronomy could be aliens, then we have a lot of potential evidence for aliens — there is an awful lot we do not understand.
To stop ourselves from jumping to weird and wonderful conclusions every time we come across something strange, science has several sanity checks. Is this a natural object of the type that we suspect to be extremely common in the Milky Way, or is it aliens?
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