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Elon Musk has a big goal for SpaceX’s Starlink: eventually, use 40,000 satellites to provide internet coverage for the entire planet, far surpassing any existing satellite internet service. But there is more to the mission. In a new study, a scientist suggests that Musk’s satellite network could also make Earth a prime target of extraterrestrial interest.
Starlink’s 40,000 satellites in orbit – 1,000 of which have already been criticized by astronomers for having the Night skies – will be enough to register as a megastructure that will eventually appear on the radar of a distant civilization, writes Zaza Osmanov, professor of astrophysics at Tbilisi Free University in Georgia, in a new article on the preprint -Server arXiv was released.
Osmanov studied how Starlink’s electrical signature is displayed via signals to large interferometers in distant alien civilizations. Since the advanced interferometers on earth could detect this activity from other planets, Osmanov writes, anyone else using the same technology could do the same to us partially or completely covered, ”explains Osmanov. That means finding the crucial turning point at which the Starlink satellite network becomes visible to a distant observer.
To assess what is visible from where, Osmanov examined what it would mean to have the earth with a large amount of literally everything to cover. For example, are there enough graphs to cover the atmosphere and become visible from space? It turns out we have enough carbon to do this many, many times if we wanted to – like an Everlasting Gobstopper made from sheets of graphene the size of the earth.
How much time will it take us to process that much material start and place now that we know we have it? Osmanov estimates that this will take 1,000 years on a regular basis. At this point there would be enough material in space for humans to be visible to aliens.
And what about Starlink? Musk has no plans to make a blanket of material as part of his satellite network – this would block the sun, not the hip Bill Gates way. When people are crazy about thousands of tiny satellites, imagine a huge blanket of sky going over. However, the radio signals emitted by Starlink and other satellites mean that the right instrument on a distant planet can observe the energy and wave signature of the satellite network.
There is even a third option, which is Gates-funded geoengineering. If Earthlings decide to fill the stratosphere with aerosol particles to reflect away the warming solar radiation, one may wonder whether this reflectance would be visible as a kind of iridescent shimmer. Will the earth light up like an iconic color-changing Ford Explorer from the 90s?
Currently, the earth is safely invisible to the distant telescopes and instruments of aliens who scan the sky with technology comparable to ours. This of course assumes that they are not watching us yet.
Ref: https://www.popularmechanics.com
