The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) offers the opportunity to directly image planets orbiting distant stars, and maybe, just maybe, detect signs of life.
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The possibility of remotely detecting biosignatures has been a hot topic in recent years.
In our own solar system, the recent discovery of phosphine in Venus' atmosphere sparked speculation that the chemical might be created by a microbial lifeform.
Similarly, remote sensing experts have proposed that plant life—which uses photosynthesis for energy—could be detected in infrared wavelengths, as chlorophyll absorbs visible light, but shows up brightly in infrared, and would give planets covered in foliage a distinct "red edge."
A single-pixel photo of a distant planet just might contain enough information to tell us if biological life is there, based on the information stored in the wavelengths of light that reach the telescope lens.
But what about intelligent life? Could JWST detect civilizations similar to ours? How would we look for them?
The best answers come from understanding what humanity's presence on Earth looks like from outer space.
We give off waste heat and artificial light at night, but perhaps most significantly, we produce chemicals that fill our atmosphere with compounds that wouldn't otherwise be present. These artificial atmospheric constituents just might be the thing that gives us away to a distant alien species scanning the galaxy with their own powerful telescope.
A recent paper—available in preprint on ArXiv—examined the possibility of using JWST to search for industrial pollutants in the atmospheres of exoplanets. The paper focused specifically on chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which, on Earth, are produced industrially as refrigerants and cleaning agents.
CFC's infamously created a massive hole in Earth's ozone layer in the 1980s, before an international ban on their use in 1987 helped reduce the level of CFCs back to less harmful levels. These "potent greenhouse agents with long atmospheric residence times," if found elsewhere in the galaxy, are almost certain to be the result of a civilization capable of rampant industrialization.
In other words, some of humanity's worst byproducts—our pollution—may be the very thing that makes us detectable. And it means that we may be able to find other species capable of treating their own planet's atmosphere with the same disregard. ■