James Webb Telescope Could be Adapted to Search for Alien Pollutants
Frosty Piss writes:
James Webb Telescope could be adapted to search for alien pollutants:
At this very moment, the long-anticipated James Webb Telescope is situated a million miles from Earth, preparing its mirrors and instrumentation for this summer when its observations will finally begin.
Now, some scientists are considering the proposition that JWST could be tuned to observe something like atmospheric pollution in an alien civilization's sky. Indeed, given that certain pollutant molecules have no known natural origins, the notion of using the telescope to search for such "technosignatures" - as opposed to biosignatures - is intriguing.
"Atmospheric pollution is one unique hallmark of industry that does not occur from other forms of biology on Earth, so finding such pollution in an exoplanet atmosphere would be compelling evidence that the planet has technology," says astrobiologist Jacob Haqq Misra. "CFCs are a particularly compelling technosignature because they are known to be technological, they are potent greenhouse gases and they can have a long atmospheric lifetime."
[...] Misra isn't the only scientist thinking that pollutants could be a marker for intelligent life in the universe. Avi Loeb, the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University, co-authored a paper published in 2014 exploring the idea as well.
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