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My hypothesis is that, if given a (simulated) spectroscopical observation of Earth's atmosphere from a distance, astrophysicists would come up with plausible no
by avian 6y ago
My hypothesis is that, if given a (simulated) spectroscopical observation of Earth's atmosphere from a distance, astrophysicists would come up with plausible non-biological, non-industrial explanations for it.
- marshray 6y agoWould be interesting to find an explanation for the surge (and decline) in atmospheric Freon, and its replacement with other refrigerants.
- InitialLastName 6y agoWould fluorocarbons be detectable in a remote spectrogram of the atmosphere at the levels they existed in the earth's atmosphere? Would the depletion of ozone in the atmosphere be more visible? From [0] it looks like CFC's peaked on the order of 1 ppb. Humans (perhaps) just detected phosphine at the level of ~20ppb in Venus's atmosphere through telescope spectral analysis [1], but that's on a very close planet that we've been staring at intently for 4000 years; presumably there are compounds present in smaller concentrations that we haven't seen yet. Is there a heuristic for the hypothetical minimum sensitivity relative to interstellar distances? [0] https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/hats/about/cfc.html https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/hats/about/cfc.html [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-1174-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-1174-4
- marcosdumay 6y agoEmpirically, we've just had our first occurrence of astronomers not being able to explain a compound in a planet's atmosphere, and it's something much easier to deal with than a massive amount of oxygen. I think they would settle on the opinion that any explanation would be about as interesting as life. But not fully settle on life.