Could aliens be changing their planet’s climate in the same way we are? If so, scientists believe it could make finding intelligent life much easier than we thought. A groundbreaking new study suggests that greenhouse gases could be a telltale sign that aliens are hard at work changing their world’s climate — for better or worse.
Unlike climate change here on Earth, researchers from the University of California-Riverside say the presence of certain gases could signal that aliens are engaging in a process known as “terraforming.” This process modifies a planet to make it more habitable for life.
While we’ve only dreamed about doing this to Mars, what if an advanced alien civilization was already tweaking the climate of a world in their home star system? How would we know? The findings in The Astrophysical Journal zero in on artificial greenhouse gases that are making those exoplanets warmer.
According to UC Riverside astrobiologist Edward Schwieterman and his team, these gases would be a dead giveaway of planetary engineering. These aren’t your run-of-the-mill greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide. We’re talking about super-powered, lab-created chemicals that could rapidly warm up a freezing world. Think of it as a giant global warming bomb that turns cold, uninhabitable planets like Mars into a warm, livable world like Earth within years instead of centuries.
“For us, these gases are bad because we don’t want to increase warming. But they’d be good for a civilization that perhaps wanted to forestall an impending ice age or terraform an otherwise-uninhabitable planet in their system, as humans have proposed for Mars,” says Schwieterman in a university release.
5 Gases Astronomers Are Looking For
The researchers identified five specific gases that could serve as smoking guns for alien terraforming:
- Fluorinated versions of methane
- Fluorinated versions of ethane
- Fluorinated versions of propane
- Gases made of nitrogen and fluorine
- Gases made of sulfur and fluorine
If you’re thinking these sound like something cooked up in a chemistry lab, you’re not wrong. Here on Earth, these gases play a role in the production of computer chips. These gases don’t occur naturally in significant amounts, which is precisely why finding them on another world would be so exciting. Scientists call potential signs of alien technology “technosignatures,” and these gases would fit the bill perfectly.