Timeline for Did Huygens probe carry any hint to help find its home planet?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
10 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| May 14, 2014 at 6:12 | vote | accept | orique | ||
| May 13, 2014 at 18:50 | comment | added | Nickolai | @LocalFluff I think you're forgetting to take into account the context of the question, which is whether or not any alien race that discovers the Huygens probe will be able to determine where it came from. I think we're assuming that if they've discovered Huygens, they're on Titan, not in another solar system. | |
| May 13, 2014 at 17:05 | comment | added | TildalWave | @LocalFluff Why do you insist with interstellar distances? I'll repeat, we have no probes there. Huygens was a probe to Titan. We can spectroscopy analyze Saturn's moons from the Earth-based or in-orbit telescopes now, why would it be a problem for an advanced civilisation to do it the other way around for a bigger target that's closer to the Sun? | |
| May 13, 2014 at 16:52 | comment | added | LocalFluff | @TidalWave I very much doubt that the fraction of PCB or whatever industrial emissions of whatever chemical into our atmosphere to date could be measured from any star with any instrument which could ever be manufactured by any civlization. Human "handprint" on the atmosphere is extremely slight. Other technosignatures are much more apparent, like radio or night side city light emissions. However, some SETI program might identify a "terraformed" or "mined" exoplanet with an unnatural atmosphere. Far beyond todays industry here. | |
| May 13, 2014 at 16:08 | comment | added | TildalWave | @LocalFluff Nearest star? What plaques on spacecraft do we have there? And SETI disagrees, that's one of the main selling points of their planned Colossus telescope project. I also didn't necessarily mean CO2 emissions, there's other, clearly non-naturally occurring pollutants with predictable decay rate when exposed to UV radiation, e.g. PCBs come to mind, but there are many others. | |
| May 13, 2014 at 15:51 | comment | added | LocalFluff | Good points. I just want to add 1) Industrial emissions is such an extremely small fraction of our atmosphere that I bet that it is physically impossible to resolve them from the nearest star regardles of instrument design. Even the largest emission, that of CO2, has increased by only 0.01% of the atmosphere. 2) When I visited Technisches Museum in Munich they were test running a reproduction of the Zuse Z3, by some definitions the first computer (with difficulties because it was surprisingly dependent on a flat stable floor). The historic IT compatibility problem is being addressed nowadays. | |
| May 13, 2014 at 15:40 | comment | added | TildalWave | @Nickolai Well yes, it's another one of the technosignatures, there's many of those we're quite oblivious to yet seem to find it easier to attribute long-term meaning to some tiny commemorative plaques. Some atmospheric pollutants also have a predictable decay rate, and of course, if we'd be still around, we also cause light and radio frequency pollution that could be easily detected from afar. It wouldn't really take a Sherlock Holmes to infer where something came from, if the only place where it could've is the Earth. | |
| May 13, 2014 at 15:35 | comment | added | Nickolai | Given that the large number of satellites we have in geostationary orbit will be there long after we're gone, I think it's a pretty big clue that this little probe probably came from the planet with all the satellite debris orbiting it. | |
| May 13, 2014 at 15:29 | history | edited | TildalWave | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 370 characters in body
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| May 13, 2014 at 15:04 | history | answered | TildalWave | CC BY-SA 3.0 |