(ORDO NEWS) — Planetary scientist Matthew Clement of the Carnegie Institution’s Earth and Planetary Laboratory and colleagues claim that aliens can alert us to their presence by moving the planets around. This is reported by the Daily Star.
Experts say that an alien civilization can organize entire solar systems with planets. It can also bombard moons and planets with asteroids to change their orbits and thereby indicate its presence, planetary scientists say.
According to astronomer Matthew Clement of the Carnegie Institution’s Earth and Planetary Laboratory, this ambitious planetary shuffling will enable aliens to advertise their presence to us.
In a recent article published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Clement and his colleagues suggest that a sufficiently powerful and motivated alien civilization could create entire solar systems with planets.
Planetologists believe that this could be done with an object the size of an asteroid. To do this, it will be enough to direct it to the correct course in order to influence other planets with gravitational shocks, gradually moving them to different orbits.
“It’s really happening,” Clement said. “We’re quite confident that the solar system’s giant planets have changed significantly since they formed, as they repeatedly flew around with debris and stuff like Pluto.”
Scientists believe that doing such a thing is not entirely from the realm of science fiction. Clement says there are already serious speculations about using gravitational pushes from another small object to steer the asteroid into a closer mining orbit.
And already now we are using the same principle to launch spacecraft into more distant orbits (or send them flying outside the solar system).
“It would take millions of years for a single asteroid, or multiple asteroids, to move a planet-sized object the [required] distance,” Clement says.
“But if you’re a more advanced civilization, maybe you could think about timescales of millions of years.”
A technologically advanced alien culture might find a way to apply gravity to an entire planet to change its orbit.
While it’s hard for us to imagine how to do that, Clement says that in terms of clean energy needs, any civilization tech-savvy enough to harness most or all of their star’s energy could do so in just over two (Earth) years.
“It is worth considering that any civilization can only broadcast itself for a short period of time,” says Clement.
Some technologies may outlive their creators – for example, our radio transmissions will propagate into space long after we’re gone, and Lageos satellites (a pair of laser reflectors in very stable orbits 5,900 kilometers above Earth) are likely to stay in orbit longer than The earth will remain habitable.
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