Search for urban lights of other civilizations

Humans should seek urban light on other planets in the process of hunting for extraterrestrial civilizations, the two American scientists said.

If you look at the earth from somewhere in the universe - such as the International Space Station (ISS) - we can locate cities by lighting the lights at night. Electric light is a sign of the existence of civilization on Earth. We can also detect the existence of other civilizations in the same way. That's what Abraham Loeb researcher at Harvard University and Edwin Turner at Princeton University, Discovery said.

From the human universe can locate cities on the left
Land at night thanks to electric light. (Photo: Discovery)

Historically, the scientific community has focused on receiving radio signals from the universe to search for extraterrestrial civilizations. However, that method has not yielded any promising results. Many people think radio signals can travel through an almost endless distance in the universe, but in reality they can only "fly" over several light years. So if a planet has civilizations hundreds of light years from Earth, we will never get a radio signal from them.

So, instead of waiting for the radio signal, Loeb and Turner think that humans should look for unnatural forms of light . They must be the forms of light that stars cannot create - like electric light and LED light.

The most modern telescopes today still cannot help humans detect unnatural light on the surface of distant planets. To observe a city on another planet, the light emitted from the city must have brightness close to the daylight on the earth. Leob and Turner believe that the next generation of telescopes - like America's James Webb space telescope and Europe's huge telescope - will be able to detect cities on other planets.

According to calculations by two scientists, the most modern telescopes today can detect Tokyo-sized cities if they are placed on a meteorite about 7,500 million kilometers from Earth, or 50 times. The average distance between the globe and the sun.