Have you ever worried that shadow forces are tapping your phone and eavesdropping on your private conversations? Well, astronomers have some good news for you. No aliens with speakers with ears (or advanced hearing organs) are invading your business.
At least not yet. Unless they are doing much better than we are funding radio astronomers. and only if they are TRUE close by.
Scientists involved in SETI (Extraterrestrial Intelligence Exploration) have long wondered how to detect extraterrestrial life. Assuming technologically advanced aliens exist, they may be trying to communicate with us. Or maybe they’re just leaking wireless energy into space by accident. Can we receive the signal anyway?
One way to approach this question is to turn around. I know the amount of energy. it was broadcast into space. Given our level of technology, would we be able to detect such a signal from light-years away?
SETI scientists have concentrated their research primarily on the study of radio waves. This is because radio waves can be easily generated. A young technological civilization will soon understand it. After all, we did. They can beam with a lot of power, have a lot of information encoded in them, and can easily pass through the myriad dust and gas clouds that litter our local space environment. Perfect for intergalactic communication.
This kind of research has been done in the past.Research published in journals chemistry In 1978, we turned our attention to television signals and military radar, the most powerful communications we sent into space at the time. Radio telescopes at the time could detect such emissions from the void of space surrounding hundreds of thousands of stars, 25 and 250 light-years away, respectively.
Over the decades since then, television broadcast signals have declined in favor of cable and the Internet to distribute programming. I think the days of wondering if aliens loved Lucy as much as we do are over.
But other methods of communication are becoming more common, and they may prove more beneficial to aliens looking for another lone civilization to chat with. A new study by SETI scientists Royal Astronomical Society Monthly NoticeSo let’s find out how our cell phone usage is detected on other stars.
I won’t go into too much technical detail, but the FCC has a decent page explaining how this works. A mobile phone emits a weak signal that can be detected by nearby radio towers, and then an even stronger signal to transmit radio waves. The coverage area of a particular telephone company is divided into small areas called cells, each with one or possibly several towers that can pick up nearby phone signals.
While an individual phone produces a signal strength of only 1 watt, a tower radiates hundreds of watts, roughly the same power as a bright light bulb. Not a lot, but a lot in total. OpenCelliD, an open database of cell locations, lists 30 million cells worldwide, and it is difficult to know exactly how many towers this corresponds to, but at least one tower per cell. There should be. The total power they emit can be measured in gigawatts and is indeed a very powerful signal.
However, the combined signal strength of all these towers isn’t the only thing aliens will detect when they point their radio telescopes at Earth. The direction in which the tower transmits is also important. Since most human cell phone users are near the ground, tower antennas are configured to transmit signals parallel to the ground and cover the ground much like a lawn sprinkler sprays water. If you’re on the ground near a tower, you can get a strong signal from it, but if you’re on top of a tower, you’ll get a weak signal at best.
The position of the tower is also important. There are millions of towers in the United States, but few in the Pacific Ocean. Additionally, the Northern Hemisphere has more towers than the Southern Hemisphere, so our alien friends will perceive different signals depending on where their home planet is in the sky.
Taken together, the scientists modeled what aliens would see from a hypothetical planet orbiting three nearby stars: HD 95735, Barnard’s Star, and Alpha Centauri A. All of these are less than 8 light-years away, practically in the backyard of the galaxy, and nosy alien peeping abilities. The stars are also spread widely in declination (a measure of latitude in the sky) to see what the Earth looks like from different directions.
Conclusion? Even if alien technology were the same as ours, with radio telescopes as big as the 100-meter-tall Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, our overall cell phone signal would still be Too weak to detect him from any of the three stars. Next-generation square-kilometer arrays, now under construction in Australia and South Africa, will be even more sensitive, but still only about 1 percent of the sensitivity needed to detect transmissions from Earth tens of trillions of kilometers away.
If they’re like us, we don’t have to worry about being eavesdropped. On the other hand, judging by the time I’ve spent in airports and other public places, most people don’t really care who listens to their calls.I wouldn’t go so far as to say that we want aliens to abduct us, but we don’t. no That’s what I’m saying
But what if our galactic neighbors were more technologically advanced? A telescope that detects interstellar radiation is like a bucket out in the rain. The bigger the bucket, the more water it collects. It is technically possible to build a radio telescope much larger than the current one. There are even serious proposals to build a giant radio telescope on the Moon. These would be much more sensitive than what we have today, and would probably be able to pick up such mobile communications even from interstellar distances.
So as long as ETs are close enough, on the right side of the sky, and have slightly better technology (or tentacles or pseudopods) than we currently have, it’s still possible that ETs can tap our cell phones. I have.
Feel free to pick the quirkiest part of the last sentence. But either way, it’s a lot of assumptions. The longest possibility is that they are very close to us. If their homeland were a thousand light-years away, they would need a moon-sized telescope to receive our communications. It is possible, but it takes a lot of effort.
Still, scientists point out that the population of land-based cell phone base stations is on the rise, and that our airwaves are getting brighter by the day. They also plan to expand their research to include more powerful 5G towers, radar, satellite services, etc. to better understand how loudly we announce our presence within the galaxy. doing.
Also remember that all this is to answer the more pertinent question: we hear they. It’s still a tentative “maybe”, an ambiguous but somewhat insane conclusion. And of course, this still hangs in the biggest question. I mean, are they there?
If so, ET call Earth. We look forward to your call.
This is an opinion and analysis article and the views expressed by the author are not necessarily those of the author. Scientific American.
