Newly Discovered Planet Orbits "Backward"

[ben m]

What if the aliens use a large light beacon to capture our attention?

Are they trying to capture our attention, or are they just shooting lasers at random points on the sky, SETI-style?

How long would they keep such a thing running? Maybe someone spent the years 5,000,000 BC through 4,990,000 BC---a period longer than all of recorded human history---shooting lasers at sabre-toothed cats and proto-hominids, and then gave up.

Maybe dozens of civilizations across the galaxy are trying to contact us right now, but they don't realize (how could they know?) that we haven't built any 100-km-diameter optical telescopes yet.

Maybe they only shoot their lasers at planets from which they've detected radio leakage, but they haven't spotted us yet because they're 200 ly away and the first broadcasts are only halfway there. Hmm, that's interesting---the sphere defined by "stars from which we could have received a reply to Marconi's first broadcasts", is only 50 ly radius. Not exactly the billion-star collection you'd normally plug in to the Drake equation.

 

[ImaginalDisc]

Are they trying to capture our attention, or are they just shooting lasers at random points on the sky, SETI-style?

How long would they keep such a thing running? Maybe someone spent the years 5,000,000 BC through 4,990,000 BC---a period longer than all of recorded human history---shooting lasers at sabre-toothed cats and proto-hominids, and then gave up.

Maybe dozens of civilizations across the galaxy are trying to contact us right now, but they don't realize (how could they know?) that we haven't built any 100-km-diameter optical telescopes yet.

Maybe they only shoot their lasers at planets from which they've detected radio leakage, but they haven't spotted us yet because they're 200 ly away and the first broadcasts are only halfway there. Hmm, that's interesting---the sphere defined by "stars from which we could have received a reply to Marconi's first broadcasts", is only 50 ly radius. Not exactly the billion-star collection you'd normally plug in to the Drake equation.

There's plenty of speculation we could engage in as to why intelligent aliens might be hard to notice, such as the technological limitations you allude to. There are others. Imagine that dolphins were good at math, and had an elaborate and intricate culture of poety and geopolitics. How would they build radios without hands? Even if they did have hands, how would aquatic intelligences harness electricity without frying themselves? Although since dolphins seem to be able to form three dimensional images through sound data, maybe intelligent dolphins would "watch" radio TV that's a collection of recorded sounds meant to simulate a sonar "picture" of a scene. Or, maybe dolphins would never be able to design a machine which can duplicate the work their own bodies and brains do in generating that kind of sonar data.

Have I confused you as much as I have myself? It's intrinsically difficult to second guess aliens. The one thing it's easy to figure out is that if any aliens communicated with one another through high frequency radio waves, or used any other part of the electromagnetic spectrum that does stick out from the phenomenae of nature, we could theoretically pick up that stuff.