'Laser Cloak'
Could Hide Earth from Evil Aliens, Study Suggests
by Sarah
Lewin, Space.com
A new paper describes how laser beams could disrupt
measurements of Earth's orbit around the sun, potentially deceiving inquisitive
aliens. Here, a 22W laser used for adaptive optics shines from the Very Large
Telescope in Chile. ESO/G. Hüdepohl
A simple laser beam could disrupt aliens' observations of
Earth, making it look like there's nobody home on the third rock from the sun,
a new study suggests.
David Kipping, an astronomer at Columbia University in
New York, said he first considered this idea when he heard about the strangely
dimming star that was detected recently by NASA's Kepler space telescope.
Researchers speculated the signal could have come from an "alien
megastructure" orbiting the star.
That's a remote possibility, many scientists stressed;
the star's strange signal likely has a natural cause. But the Kepler
observations got Kipping thinking about ways humanity could alter the signals
it sends into space — or hide them altogether from life-hunting aliens, who may
have malicious intentions.
He and Columbia graduate student Alex Teachey concluded
that it would be surprisingly easy to wipe out Earth's signal, distort it to
look strange or even edit out the fingerprint of life — provided researchers
knew the location of the snooping aliens.
We essentially played the thought experiment that if we
really had xenophobic tendencies and wanted to avoid the Earth being discovered
(as Stephen Hawking and others have been
warning about), could we hide the Earth from alien
planet-hunters?" Kipping said in an email.
How to build a cloaking device
The key to Kipping and Teachey's thinking lies in the way
humans have identified most planets around other stars, a process called the
transit method. This strategy, which has most famously been employed
by the Kepler spacecraft, detects tiny dips in the brightness of stars, which
can indicate an orbiting planet.
The transit method could theoretically be used by alien
civilizations to detect Earth, too. But there's a way to trip up such
extraterrestrial searches, Kipping and Teachey said.
"To make it look like the planet is not there at
all, you've got to get rid of that dip. You've got to fill in the missing
starlight," Teachey said in an
explanatory video.
Engineers could
shine a very bright laser or collection of lasers toward a star suspected of
hosting intelligent aliens during the time Earth was passing in front of the
sun from the other planet's perspective. Then, aliens making measurements
wouldn't see any change in solar brightness.
"I started
to think about lasers," Kipping told Space.com. "Most people might have
stopped there, because the sun emits so much light — how could you possibly
produce a laser beam which could ever compete with
the sun? But it turns out, when you actually run through the equations, it's
really not that bad."
"We
could build this next week if we wanted to," Teachey added.
To
alter Earth's signature as seen by an alien version of Kepler, a laser system
would have to emit 30 megawatts of power for about 10 hours per year,
coinciding with Earth's passing in front of the sun, the duo calculated.
This
is a condensed version of a story that originally appeared on Space.com.
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