Speaker 1: I want you to imagine something with me for a second.
Picture yourself walking through this really dense ancient forest.
Speaker 2: Okay, sitting the scene. I like it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but it isn't you know, a lovely sun dappled
afternoon hike. It is the absolute dead of night.
Speaker 2: Oh right, the kind of dark where your eyes never
actually adjust exactly.
Speaker 1: We were talking about pitch black, suffocating darkness. The tree
canopy is completely blocking out the moon and the stars.
You're navigating over these unseen roots. The air is freezing cold,
and you have this creeping, unshakable, primal instinct that this
environment is just well, it's dangerous.
Speaker 2: You don't know what's out there in the trees.
Speaker 1: Right, You don't know if it's a predator, a steep
drop off, or just empty woods. All you know is
that you need to survive the trek. So, relying on
your modern tools, you reach into your bag and pull
out a massive, heavy duty, high luman flashlight.
Speaker 2: Very natural human response. Yeah, we want to see the
threat exactly.
Speaker 1: You flick the switch and this brilliant beam of white
light violently cuts through the darkness. You start waving it
all around you, sweeping it through the branches, illuminating the path,
just trying to see what is like ten feet ahead
of you.
Speaker 2: And it works right for a second, you feel safe.
Speaker 1: You do for a brief moment. Having that light makes
you feel incredibly secure. You can see the immediate obstacles,
you can avoid tripping over a log. But what you
are completely ignoring in that fleeting moment of false security
is a well a terrifying reality of physics, which is that.
Speaker 2: The light travels a lot further than ten feet.
Speaker 1: Exactly, in a truly dark forest, that brilliant beam of
light you are waving around to see ten feet ahead
can be seen for miles by absolutely anything else that
might be out there in the dark.
Speaker 2: That is a man. That's a profound visceral scenario. It
perfectly encapsulates the grand illusion of observation.
Speaker 1: The illusion of control.
Speaker 2: Yes, exactly, the flashlight provides a temporary, localized illusion of control.
You believe that because you are holding the you're the
primary observer, you feel like the active participant.
Speaker 1: In the environment, but you're actually just making yourself a target.
Speaker 2: Precisely, the physical reality of electromagnetic radiation, which is all
light is, really dictates that the very act of trying
to observe your immediate surroundings has just transformed you into
the most highly visible, undeniable target in the entire ecosystem.
Speaker 1: You trade your localized site for generalized exposure.
Speaker 2: Right, You are practically screaming, I am.
Speaker 1: Right here, and that trade off, that terrifying accidental exposure,
is exactly what we are unpacking today. Welcome to Thrilling Threads.
I am so glad you have chosen to join us
for this journey because our mission today is to pull
back the curtain on something that is happening right over
our heads every single second of the day, and.
Speaker 2: It goes completely unnoticed by most.
Speaker 1: Of us completely. We are synthesizing recent astronomical models, deep
atmospheric chemistry research, and deep space telemetry studies to reveal
the ten accidental, unavoidable ways humanity is effectively screaming its
exact location into the cosmic void, along with.
Speaker 2: Our specific technological vulnerabilities, which is the really scary part.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a huge piece of this. And the operative
word there is accidental, right.
Speaker 2: Because when most people think about humanity communicating with the cosmos,
their minds naturally gravitate toward our deliberate, poetic attempts to
say hello.
Speaker 1: Like the Voyager probes launched back in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 2: Exactly the famous Golden Record.
Speaker 1: Yeah. We attached these beautiful gold plated copper disks to
the outside of the spacecraft. We encoded them with greetings
in what fifty five languages?
Speaker 2: Fifty five languages, the sound of a mother's kiss, a heartbeat.
Speaker 1: A little Mozart, some chuck Berry, and a map showing
the location of our sun relative to nearby pulsars. It
was this carefully curated, highly romanticized message of peace.
Speaker 2: It was a beautiful gesture truly, but from an astrophysical standpoint,
it is functionally irrelevant.
Speaker 1: Wait, really irrelevant completely.
Speaker 2: I mean, the sansmitter on the Voider spacecraft operates at
roughly twenty watts.
Speaker 1: Twenty watts, that's nothing.
Speaker 2: It's less power than the light bulb inside your refrigerator.
The probe itself is tiny, it's cold, and it's drifting
silently through the unfathomable emptiness of the ort cloud.
Speaker 1: So nobody is ever going to find it.
Speaker 2: The chances of an extraterrestrial intelligence ever stumbling across that
physical object are so mathematically infinitesimal that they essentially border
on zero. We really shouldn't be worrying about the poetic
messages we put in a bottle.
Speaker 1: We need to be looking at the massive, chaotic industrial
noise we are generating simply by existing.
Speaker 2: Exactly the unavoidable messy byproducts of modern life.
Speaker 1: Like the smartphone sitting on the desk next to you
right now, or the commercial flight you took to visit
your family last summer, the way.
Speaker 2: We cool our homes, the way we light our streets at.
Speaker 1: Night, just the basic infrastructure we rely on to keep
the global economy from collapsing.
Speaker 2: Right, when you strip away the poetry and look at
the raw data and the astrophysical models, a very stark
picture emerges. This mundane infrastructure acts as a continuous omnidirectional broadcast.
Speaker 1: We're generating what astronomers call techno signatures.
Speaker 2: Yes, and the sheer intensity and scale of these technosignatures
are just staggering.
Speaker 1: Let's dive right into that scale, then, starting with the
invisible rhythm of our daily lives, Because our modern world
requires massive transit and communication infrastructure to function, right, and
that creates a continuous electromagnetic pulse it does.
Speaker 2: And the first major techno signature in the research focuses
on global aviation, specifically airport readar systems.
Speaker 1: Now, when most of us think of air traffic control,
we think of it as a highly localized safety measure.
You have a spinning dish at a major airport like
Heathrow or JFK.
Speaker 2: Right, bouncing radio waves off the metallic hull of the
passenger jet a few miles up in the sky, just to.
Speaker 1: Make sure planes don't collide. It seems totally contained.
Speaker 2: It seems contained because our biological senses are limited, we
can't naturally see radio frequencies, so we just assume they
stop where their usefulness ends.
Speaker 1: Out of sight, out of mind exactly.
Speaker 2: But electromagnetism doesn't care about our intentions. An air traffic
control radar operates by firing an intense burst of radio
frequency energy outward. A tiny fraction of a percent of
that energy hits the airplane and reflects back to the
receiver on the ground.
Speaker 1: But the other ninety nine point nine percent of that
energy doesn't just evaporate.
Speaker 2: No, it doesn't. Radio waves in these specific frequencies are
highly penetrative. They don't get absorbed by the clouds. They
aren't stopped by the upper atmosphere.
Speaker 1: They pierce right through the ionosphere completely unobstructed, and travel
outward into the absolute vacuum of space at the speed of.
Speaker 2: Light one hundred and eighty six thousand miles per second.
Speaker 1: And we aren't just talking about one airport here. We
are talking about the aggregate of the entire global aviation.
Speaker 2: Infrastructure, civilian airports, military bases, weather tracking.
Speaker 1: Stations, thousands of high powered radar systems, continues scanning massive
volumes of airspace twenty four hours a day. The sources
calculate the total energy output of this global radar web,
and the number is well, it almost breaks the human brain.
Speaker 2: It's massive.
Speaker 1: We are emitting approximately two quadrillion watts of radio power continuously.
Speaker 2: Two quadrillion. Wants to put that into perspective, that is
roughly equivalent to the entire solar energy striking a significant
portion of the Earth's surface, but concentrated entirely into specific
narrow bands of the radio spectrum.
Speaker 1: So, if an extraterrestrial civilization has radio telescopes comparable to
the ones we have built here on Earth, facilities like
the Very Large Array or the newly constructed square kilometer array. Right,
If they have those, Earth doesn't look like a quiet, dim,
rocky sphere in the radio spectrum. Earth is a blindingly bright,
chaotic beacon.
Speaker 2: It is, but it's not just a steady glow. And
I think this is the most fascinating part of the
radar signature. Earth isn't stationary. It's a rotating sphere.
Speaker 1: Right. We spin, So imagine you have these massive concentrator
hubs of radar activity at major metropolitan centers New York, London, Tokyo, Dubai.
Speaker 2: Yes, And as the Earth spins on its axis, these
localized hubs of intense radiation rise over the horizon and
then eventually set from the perspective of a distant star, it.
Speaker 1: Creates this rhythmic sweeping pattern. To an outside observer, Earth
operates exactly like a cosmic lighthouse.
Speaker 2: A cosmic lighthouse is the perfect analogy.
Speaker 1: The beam of two quadrillion watts of radio energy literally
sweeps across the galactic ocean in a highly predictable pattern.
Speaker 2: And that predictable pattern is the absolute crux of the issue.
If we look at this from the perspective of an
extraterrestrial astronomer situated within say, fifty one hundred light years
of us.
Speaker 1: They don't need to decode the radar signal.
Speaker 2: No, not at all. They don't need to understand that
the signal is tracking a Boeing seven seven seven seven
flying over Chicago. They simply point their instruments toward our
star system and they notice a high, highly localized, incredibly
structured pulse of microwave radiation.
Speaker 1: And the key detail, the dead giveaway, right, is that
this pulse is perfectly synchronized with the rotation rate of
our planet.
Speaker 2: Exactly, it's sync to the rotation of a small, rocky
planet in the habitable zone of that star.
Speaker 1: Because nature on its own doesn't produce that kind of
highly specific synchronization.
Speaker 2: No it doesn't. I mean nature produces an abundance of
radio waves. Pulsars sweep regular beams of radiation across the sky, quasars,
and active galactic nuclei just roll with radio noise.
Speaker 1: Even our own sun produces massive radio bursts during solar flares.
Speaker 2: Sure, but natural astrophysical phenomena do not create perfectly synchronized,
geographically clustered microwave pulses that happen to track perfectly with
a twenty four hour diurnal rotation.
Speaker 1: That mathematical rhythm, that localized rotating beacon is the undeniable
heartbeat of a complex, mechanized society.
Speaker 2: It is the definitive proof of engineering. We built our
air graphic control systems purely for localized safety, but for
the last seven decades, every single time a radar dish
sweeps the horizon, it fires a flare into the cosmos.
Speaker 1: Any civilization watching the skies for signs of emerging technology
would instantly recognize that Earth hosts an industrialized species without
a does we are literally announcing our existence to the
galaxy just by trying to manage our daily commutes and
holiday travel. That is wild to think about, but radar
is a targeted, highly structured sweep. The research points out
another layer to this invisible rhythm that is much more.
Speaker 2: Defense and honestly, it hits a lot closer to home
for every single person listening to this right now, right.
Speaker 1: We need to transition from the massive spinning dishes at
the airport to the mobile phone you are probably holding
in your hand or have sitting in your pocket. Let's
talk about the cellular communication network.
Speaker 2: This represents a massive evolution in our planetary signature. Over
the last twenty to thirty years, humanity has enveloped the
surface of the Earth in a dense, interlock continuous web
of cellular communication.
Speaker 1: We are no longer talking about a few thousand high
powered radar dishes. We are talking about millions of cell
towers constantly pinging billions of individual mobile devices.
Speaker 2: It is an intimate, localized technology that has scaled to
a planetary level.
Speaker 1: It really puts things into a strange perspective. Our basic
human desire to just scroll through social media, or to
send a quick text message to a friend asking what
they want for dinner, or to.
Speaker 2: Stream a deep dive on a podcast while you walk the.
Speaker 1: Dog right, all of that collectively creates this continuous, low
level hum of microwave radiation. The sources describe it as
a broadband electromagnetic halo that literally wraps around the entire globe.
Speaker 2: It is a phenomenal concept. We have constructed an artificial
electromagnetic atmosphere, and this shifting nature of that halo is
what makes it such a potent and undeniable techno signature.
Speaker 1: Because, unlike the radar beam which sweaks past a distant
star and vanishes for a few hours until the Earth
rotates again.
Speaker 2: The radiation from our global mobile networks is continuous, but
this is key, It is not uniform. It fluctuates in
a highly specific, mathematically trackable.
Speaker 1: Way because of the time zones.
Speaker 2: Exactly. Recent astrophysical studies have modeled exactly what this cellular
leakage looks like from neighboring star systems such as Alpha
Centauri or Barnard's Star.
Speaker 1: And what does it actually look like. Because we aren't
broadcasting high powered booms into space with our phones. The
antennas inside our phones are tiny.
Speaker 2: Individually, they are microscopic in the grand scheme of things,
but in the aggregate they create a steady, unnatural glow
in the microwave spectrum. And here is where the behavior
of the species reveals itself.
Speaker 1: The waking and sleeping cycles.
Speaker 2: Yes, as the planet rotates, the terminator line, the line
dividing day and night, moves across the continents. As massive
population centers in Asia wake up in the morning, billions
of devices connect, network traffic spikes, and the intensity of
that microwave glow sharply increases.
Speaker 1: A few hours later, Europe wakes up and a new
geographical node of the Halo.
Speaker 2: Bradons and the Americas. People wake up, they check their emails,
they navigate traffic, they stream media, and the network just roars.
And then as the evening falls, they eventually go to
sleep and the localized network quiets down.
Speaker 1: So an alien astronomer wouldn't just know we're here. They
could literally chart our bedtimes.
Speaker 2: They absolutely could.
Speaker 1: We are broadcasting the daily biological rhythm of human life
mapped onto our technological infrastructure in real time. That is
so creepy and so fascinating.
Speaker 2: That is the crucial takeaway. They wouldn't need to intercept
the data packets. They wouldn't need to decode your text
messages or decrypt your banking app to understand what they
are looking at.
Speaker 1: The medium is the message, right.
Speaker 2: The sheer volume of the radiation, combined with its geometric
distribution across the planet's surface and its strict adherence to
a biological waking and sleeping cycle, tells them everything they
need to know.
Speaker 1: It proves the existence of a highly interconnected, technologically dependent
species that has achieved global synchronization.
Speaker 2: Furthermore, as developing nations build out their infrastructure and as
the entire globe transitions to denser, higher frequency networks like five.
Speaker 1: G and increasingly satellite based cellular networks too.
Speaker 2: Yes, exactly, this microwave halo is growing brighter, denser, and
more complex every single day.
Speaker 1: We are just wrapping ourselves in a louder and louder
blanket of statics. So the radar in the cell networks
represent our ambient noise. It's the background hum of humanity
just talking to each other and managing our internal.
Speaker 2: Logistics our accidental leakage.
Speaker 1: Right, But there is a massive conceptual leap we need
to make here. It's one thing to accidentally leak energy
while you're looking at yourself. What happens when humanity stops
looking inward and we intentionally aim our most powerful technology
out into the absolute dark.
Speaker 2: This is where it gets highly directional and deeply dangerous.
Speaker 1: Exactly, this brings us to a deeply fascinating and somewhat
terrifying section of the research deep space communications and planetary radar.
We are essentially firing blind into the universe.
Speaker 2: It is a vital distinction to make The ambient leakage
from cell phones and airport radar is omnidirectional, it spreads
out and becomes relatively diffuse by the time it reaches
interstellar distances.
Speaker 1: But when we discuss the Deep Space Network the DSN,
operated by space agencies like NASA.
Speaker 2: We are dealing with highly focused, incredibly concentrated, and intensely
powerful transmissions. When scientists want to command a rover that
is creeping across the rust red sands of Mars, or
when they need to transmit a complex software patch to
a probe orbiting the turbulent atmosphere.
Speaker 1: Of Jupiter, they cannot rely on a diffuse broadcasts no.
Speaker 2: They'd never reach it. They use global arrays of massive
seventy meters wide radio intennas to be in intense, highly
structured data streams directly at those robotic targets.
Speaker 1: It is precision communication on an interplanetary scale. And I
want to make sure we really grasp the geometry of
this because it's the key to why this is so dangerous.
Space is vast, it's incomprehensibly huge, and planets, even massive
gas giants like Jupiter, are incredibly tiny targets when you
were aiming at them from hundreds of millions of miles away.
Speaker 2: It's like trying to hit a speck of dust with
a laser pointer from across a football stadium.
Speaker 1: Right, So, imagine a massive dish on Earth, say the
one out in Goldstone, California. It fires a concentrated beam
of data at Mars. Mars absorbs a tiny fraction of
that signal. The rover recedes its instructions to drill into
a rock.
Speaker 2: But the rest of the signal doesn't just stop.
Speaker 1: Exactly. The vast fast majority of that powerful transmission doesn't
just stop at Mars. It spills right past the edges
of the planet and keeps hurtling outward into deep space
at the speed of light.
Speaker 2: It's unavoidable physics.
Speaker 1: I was trying to think of a way to visualize
this earlier, and initially I thought it was like using
a sniper laser sight and painting a target on the
wall behind your actual target. But that's not quite right
because a laser is narrow. A better analogy it would
be standing in the middle of the Grand Canyon at
pitch black night.
Speaker 2: Okay, I'm picturing it.
Speaker 1: You have a friend standing on a ridge a mile away.
You want to tell them something, but you don't want
anyone else to hear. But the only tool you have
is an incredibly powerful military grade bullhorn. Oh wow, You
point the bullhorn at your friend and yell your message.
Your friend hears you, sure, but the acoustic energy of
your voice, that focus blast of sound blows right past
your friend, bounces down the canyon walls and echoes for
fifty miles, waking up every single predator, camper, and animal
in the entire valley.
Speaker 2: That is a brilliant refinement of the analogy. It perfectly
captures the concept of spillover. We have been routinely firing
off these high powered commands into the void for decades,
heavily focused on the operational success of the mission, with
very little consideration for what lies beyond the intended target.
Speaker 1: Because we just assume it's empty space out there.
Speaker 2: But it's not empty. And recent astrophysical studies mapping the
trajectories of these transmissions have uncovered in a chilling geometric reality.
If you trace the path of our most frequent deep
space communications, they follow the orbital plane of our solar system,
the ecliptic.
Speaker 1: Because naturally that is where all of our planets, moons,
and the probes we send to them reside right.
Speaker 2: So all of our loudest, most focused shouting is happening
on a very flat plane. And if an extraterrestrial civilization
happens to reside in a star system that is aligned
along that specific plane, if.
Speaker 1: They are situated behind Mars or Jupiter relative to Earth
during our transmission windows.
Speaker 2: They're sitting directly in the crosshirs of humanity's most powerful
data streams.
Speaker 1: They are getting the full blast of the bullhorn precisely.
Speaker 2: Researchers have actually mapped the background stars that fall into
these billover zones, and they've calculated that observers aligned with
the Earth Mars or Earth Jupiter axis during these command
windows have a massive statistical probability of intercepting our signal.
Speaker 1: And the terrifying implication here goes back to the nature
of the signal itself. If an alien intelligence intercepts Ambiyet radar,
they learn we have machines.
Speaker 2: Right, But if they intercept this deep space spillover, they
aren't getting faint, garbled static. They are intercepting high density,
heavily structured data. They are catching targeted, high gain telemetry streams.
Speaker 1: What does that actually mean for them? High gain telemetry like,
what are they seeing?
Speaker 2: It means we're handing them the keys to our technological castle.
Telemetry contains complex mathematical encoding, error correction algorithms, and highly
organized packet.
Speaker 1: Structures, so it's obviously artificial.
Speaker 2: Beyond obvious. Even if they cannot read the specific code,
like if they don't know what's a command to move
a robotic arm on a Mars rover, the mathematical architecture
of the signal proves our level of computing power.
Speaker 1: We are handing them our exact spatial coordinates, yes, and.
Speaker 2: We are demonstrating our specific technical sophistication. Every single time
we update a rover software. We cast this dense technological
shadow cross thousands of light years, providing any listening intelligence
with a highly detailed profile of the species pulling the strings.
Speaker 1: We are basically mailing our resume to the universe and
showing them exactly how smart we are, which unfortunately also
shows them exactly what our limitations are.
Speaker 2: It's a massive security risk, hypothetically.
Speaker 1: Speaking, Now, let me push back on this a little bit,
or at least play Devil's advocate regarding the next major
technology the sources highlight planetary radar. Because with the deep
space network, we are talking to our own probes. It's logistical.
But with planetary radar, we are talking about planetary defense.
Speaker 2: This is a very complex ethical and scientific debate. Yes, right.
Speaker 1: Historically astronomers used massive fixed dish facilities, most famously the
Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico before its unfortunate collapse, to
fire incredibly concentrated blasts of microwave energy directly at near
Earth asteroids to map them exactly, and from a human perspective,
we have to do this right, It's a fundamental survival mechanism.
We have a dark universe full of giant rocks that
could literally wipe out our species.
Speaker 2: So we fire a blast of energy at rock. We
catch the unimaginably faint reflection that bounces back, and we
calculate its trajectory to figure out if it's going to
hit us.
Speaker 1: We need to know if an asteroid is coming. It
seems entirely justified. How is this a bad thing?
Speaker 2: It is absolutely justified from a localized, short term survival standpoint.
No serious astronomer or planetary scientists is suggesting we should
just remain blind to hazardous near Earth objects.
Speaker 1: Okay, good, but we have.
Speaker 2: To intellectually acknowledge the terrifying paradox this survival mechanism creates
to bounce a radio signal off a relatively tiny, non
reflective rock millions of miles away and still be able
to detect the microscopic echo that returns to Earth. The
initial output of energy must be staggering.
Speaker 1: It's brute force.
Speaker 2: Physic it is the definition of brute force. The concept
is known as equivalent isotropic radiated power or EERP. It
measures how bright a highly focused be would be if
it were radiated in all.
Speaker 1: Directions, and how bright is it.
Speaker 2: When facilities like Recibo or the Goldstone Solar System radar
fire their planetary radar beams, their EERP can reach into
the tens of tarot.
Speaker 1: Watters tens of terot.
Speaker 2: For a brief moment during those specific radio frequencies, those
localized dishes temporarily become the brightest radio objects in our
entire solar system. In those specific narrow bands, they completely
outshine the Sun.
Speaker 1: I just want to pause on that because it's so counterintuitive,
and antenna sitting in a jungle in Puerto Rico for
a fraction of a second is brighter in radio waves
than a massive million mile wide ball of fusing plasma.
Speaker 2: That is the power of concentrated emission. And just like
the deep space network spillover, the vast vast majority of
that intense radar pulse misses the target asteroid completely.
Speaker 1: It just grazes the rock and keeps going.
Speaker 2: It continues outward into the galaxy like a blinding interstellar searchlight.
These momentary bursts of energy represent Earth's absolute, most detectable,
albeit accidental, techno signatures. Current calculations suggest that a massive
planetary radar paying could be detected by a civilization possessing
only our current level of technology from up to twelve
thousand light years away.
Speaker 1: Wait, twelve thousand light years, Yes, that isn't just our
local neighborhood that encompasses millions of star systems. A massive
swave of the Milky Way galaxy essentially just got flash
banged by humanity's attempt to look at a space rock.
Speaker 2: Exactly, And this leads us to a deeply profound question
about survival in a potentially hostile universe. We fired these loudest,
most undeniable warning shots into the dark, not to announce
our presence but to see what was immediately in front
of us.
Speaker 1: But an alien intelligence detecting these momentary, blinding flashes of
microwave radiation wouldn't know our intentions.
Speaker 2: They wouldn't know there was an asteroid involved at all.
All they would see is an emerging civilization violently flexing
a massive technological capability.
Speaker 1: If we return to the opening analogy of the dark forest,
if the ultimate truth of the cosmos is that hiding
is the only viable survival strategy, our desperate attempts to
look out for local danger might be the exact mechanism
that draws a much larger interstellar danger directly to our doorstep.
Speaker 2: We are waving the highest powered flashlight imaginable, completely ignoring
how far the beam travels through the trees.
Speaker 1: It's the ultimate double edged sword. To survive the rocks,
we have to look. But by looking, we make ourselves
the most visible target in the galaxy. Okay, so invisible
radio waves, deep space telemetry, and radar blasts are our
loudest acoustic alarms, so to speak. But they aren't the
only way to spot a civilization, not at all.
Speaker 2: They might not even be listening to radio.
Speaker 1: Right What if a quiet patient observer doesn't even bother
building massive radio telescopes. What if they aren't listening for
our radar pings. What if they just look through a
lens at the literal chemical makeup of the air we
are breathing.
Speaker 2: This is a completely different category of leakage.
Speaker 1: It forces us to to look at the chemical fingerprint
of a reckless species. We are talking about atmospheric industrial
smog and artificial greenhouse gases. Let's start with the smog,
specifically nitrogen dioxide or anotio.
Speaker 2: To understand why this is so critical, we need to
understand how astronomers study distant planets. They use spectroscopy. When
a planet passes in front of its host star, the
starlight filters through the planet's atmosphere.
Speaker 1: And different chemicals block different colors of light.
Speaker 2: Right, Yes, different chemical elements and molecules absorb specific wavelengths
or colors of that starlight. By analyzing the light that
finally reaches our telescopes, we can see black lines missing
gaps in the spectrum, which act exactly like a chemical barcode.
Speaker 1: Now, when human astronomers look for life on exoplanets, we
primarily search for biosignatures. We look for the bar codes
of oxygen or methane or water vapor.
Speaker 2: Gases that indicate active biological respiration or organic decay.
Speaker 1: But if an advanced alien civilization is searching for us,
they wouldn't limit their search to mere biology. A planet
with moss and bacteria is interesting, but a planet with
machines is relevant. They would look for industry and.
Speaker 2: Humanity is spent the entirety of the last two centuries
pumping a very specific, highly visible advertisement of our industrial
revolution directly into our atmosphere.
Speaker 1: Nitrogen dioxide, the stuff that makes smog look brown over
a city.
Speaker 2: Yes, now, N two does occur naturally on Earth in
very small quantities. A massive lightning storm can produce it,
as concertain volcanic eruptions, But the vast majority of the
N two currently enveloping our planet, roughly seventy six percent
of it, is the direct result of high temperature combustion.
Speaker 1: It is the exhaust from our coal fired power plants,
our heavy manufacturing factories, and the billions of internal combustion
engines powering ore cars, trucks, and ships.
Speaker 2: So to an alien observer using a spectrometer to study Earth,
this unnatural concentration of N two acts as a glaring anomaly.
It absorbs specific wavelengths of visible light, curving a distinct,
heavy barcode into the visual spectrum of our planet.
Speaker 1: And the research suggests that an extraterrestrial civilization with a
space telescope only moderately larger than our James Web space
telescope could read that barcode, that unnatural No two smog
layer from up to thirty light years away.
Speaker 2: Thirty light years is a massive radius for direct atmospheric analysis.
Speaker 1: It's essentially a massive chemical billboard painted across our sky
that says, we burn stuff here.
Speaker 2: We burn stuff here. Is a perfect summarization, and the
implication of that specific barcode goes far beyond mere detection
because it doesn't just announce that we exist. It tells
a highly detailed story about our technological adolescence.
Speaker 1: Technological adolescens. I love that phrasing.
Speaker 2: If there are older, more advanced civilizations monitoring this sector
of the galaxy, they wouldn't just see N two. They
would understand what No. Two represents. It is a highly
unstable molecule. It breaks down quickly when exposed to ultraviolet starlight.
Speaker 1: OH, meaning it doesn't just ainger for millions of years.
For the barcode to be there, we have to be
actively creating it right now.
Speaker 2: Precisely, the continuous presence of two means the combustion is ongoing.
It marks us as a species in a very specific,
highly volatile phase of development. We have unlocked the immense
power of combustion and heavy industry, which means we are
capable of altering our planetary environment.
Speaker 1: But we haven't yet mastered clean efficient energy like widespread
nuclear fusion.
Speaker 2: Exactly, we haven't engineered ourselves out of our physical, messy
reliance on fossil fuels.
Speaker 1: We are the cosmic teenagers leaving empty soda cans and
dirty laundry all over our room, and the whole neighborhood
can smell it.
Speaker 2: It is a very apt, if slightly humbling comparison. We
are the most dangerous transition period of species can endure.
We have the capability to create global environmental impacts, but
we are still relying on primitive, dirty power generation.
Speaker 1: By looking at the smog choking our major cities and
alien intelligence wouldn't just locate us, they would instantly diagnose
our exact stage of technological maturity. We are broadcasting our
growing pains through the very pollution we struggle to breathe.
Speaker 2: That is a staggering weight I view our own pollution,
but it's scientifically accurate.
Speaker 1: But the sources highlight that No. Two is only one
part of our chemical footprint, and it actually has a
slight ambiguity to it because, as you mentioned, lightning and
volcanoes do make two. So an alien astronomer looking at
our smog barcode might have a tiny shatter of a doubt.
They might think, well, maybe Earth is just undergoing a
period of hyperactive volcanism.
Speaker 2: That is a fair scientific assumption for them to make.
Speaker 1: But that shadow of doubt vanishes completely when we get
to the second chemical signature, artificial greenhouse gases, specifically chlorofluorcarbons
or CFCs. This part of the research completely shifted my
perspective because while No. Two has a small natural excuse,
CFCs have zero natural excuses. They simply do not exist.
Speaker 2: In nature none whatsoever. Humanity manufactured these complex synthetic molecules
starting in the early twentieth century, primarily for use in refrigeration,
air conditioning systems and as propellants in aerosol cans like hairspray.
Speaker 1: The chemistry is fascinating but destructive.
Speaker 2: Yes, CFCs are incredibly stable in the lower atmosphere, which
made them great for industry, but they are highly toxic
to the stratospheric ozone layer. Because CFCs are entirely the
product of laboratory synthesis, they represent the absolute holy grail
of techno signatures for an observing astronomer. They are a
chemical compound with a virtually zero percent false positive rate.
Speaker 1: So if you are looking at a planet's atmospheric barcode
and you see the lines for CFCs, you know with
absolute one hundred percent certainty that a technological civilization synthesize them.
Speaker 2: There are no CFC producing trees, there are no CFC volcanoes.
Speaker 1: It is a permanent, undeniable neon sign that says intelligent
life is here.
Speaker 2: It removes all ambiguity. CFCs absorbed heavily in the thermal
mid infrared spectrum. Now to explain why that matters, The
Earth absorbs visible LFE and the Sun warms up and
radiates that heat back out into space as infra red radiation.
This normal planetary heat loss, right, But CSCs act like
a microscopicy brick wall for that specific wave length of
heat they trap it. This absorption creates a massive, undeniable
spike in our atmospheric opacity in the mid interred range.
Speaker 1: And even though humanity globally banded together in the nineteen
eighties with the Montreal Protocol to ban the worst of
the CFCs in order to save our ozone layer.
Speaker 2: These molecules are so robust that the residual gases will
linger in our atmosphere for centuries. That neon sign is
going to keep flashing long after our factories stopped producing
the gas.
Speaker 1: But if we delve into the psychology and the strategic
thinking of an advanced alien observer, this is where the
detection of CFCs transitions from an interesting discovery to something
truly unsettling.
Speaker 2: Right, the research goes into why an advanced civilization might
actively look for css, and it has nothing to do
with hairspray.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they don't care about our refrigeration.
Speaker 2: To an advanced species, artificial greenhouse gases are tools of
planetary engineering. If an advanced civilization finds a freezing dead world,
bread perhaps a planet sitting just outside the habitable zone
of its star, and they want to colonize it. How
do they warm it up?
Speaker 1: You pump it full of hyper efficient, highly stable artificial
greenhouse gases like CFCs. It's a brilliant brute force way
to terraform it.
Speaker 2: Exactly. Yeah, you artificially thicken the blanket to trap the
star's heat so liquid water can flow and life can survive.
Speaker 1: But imagine the cognitive dissonance for that alien astronomer. They
point their telescope at Earth, they calculate our orbit. They
see that Earth is sitting perfectly in the habitable zone.
Speaker 2: They see the biosignatures of a lush, water rich, thriving biosphere.
Speaker 1: And then layered on top of that perfection, they see
the massive, unmistakable signature of terraforming gases.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, I see where this is going.
Speaker 1: They would look at us and think, wait, why are
they pumping extreme terraforming heat wrapping gases into a planet
that is already biologically perfect? Are they intentionally trying to
overheat their own biosphere? It makes us look completely insane.
Speaker 2: It makes us look deeply irrational, suspicious, and frankly dangerously reckless.
The chemical signature we accidentally leaked through old refrigerators and
discarded aerosol cans paints a terrifying psychological profile.
Speaker 1: Really does.
Speaker 2: It presents a picture of a technologically capable species that
is recklessly tampering with a thermodynamic balance of a perfectly
habitable world. It signals to the galaxy that we possess
the industrial capacity to alter planets, but entirely lack the
wisdom to manage the power we have unlocked.
Speaker 1: Which, depending on the philosophy of whoever is watching, could
mark us not just as a curiosity, but as an
active threat, a chaotic species that might need to be
quarantined or dealt with Before we spread our reckless industrial
habits to other star systems. We are essentially advertising our
own competence.
Speaker 2: It's a sobering thought.
Speaker 1: Okay, So, if our atmosphere is broadcasting that we are
a messy, industrializing, potentially irrational species, what happens when they
look past the atmospheric gases? What happens when they look
at the actual physical structures we are building on the
surface of our planet and in the immediate space surrounding it.
Speaker 2: We become even more visible.
Speaker 1: This brings us to a highly visual segment of our
accidental broadcast, drawing the blinds and lighting the sky. Let's
talk about our visual and orbital footprints, starting with night
side city lights.
Speaker 2: This is perhaps the most visually dramatic and rapid transformation
of our planet's surface in its four and a half
billion year history. For billions of years, the night side
of Earth was completely fundamentally dark, just black. It was
illuminated only by the faint silver albedo of the Moon,
an occasional localized lightning storm, or the rare glow of
a volcanic eruption. But in the span of less than
a century and a half, an absolute blink of an eye.
In geological time, humanity has completely re wired the visual
signature of our world.
Speaker 1: We have paved our continents with sprawling urban megacities and
illuminated them with billions of artificial light sources.
Speaker 2: You can see it in those famous composite images from
the International Space Station. The outline of human civilization is
literally drawn in glowing electrical grids against the blackness of
the oceans.
Speaker 1: You can trace the coastlines of the United States, the
dense highways of Europe, the stark national borders in the
Middle East and Asia. We have completely erased the night
and the sources point out an amazing, highly trackable shift
in the technology of that light. We aren't just emitting light,
we are dynamically changing its color signature over time.
Speaker 2: This is a huge factor for external observation.
Speaker 1: For decades, the majority of our streets and highways were
bathed in the yellow orange glow of high pressure sodium lamps.
And the sources note that a massive global emission of
monochromatic sodium light is virtually impossible to produce naturally on
a planetary scale.
Speaker 2: Right major doesn't do that.
Speaker 1: But over the last ten years we have been actively
ripping out those sodium lamps and switching everything to highly
efficient LEDs.
Speaker 2: And that transition is highly visible and highly diagnostic to
an external observer. We went from the distinct yellow orange
spectrum of sodium vapor to a sharp, broad spectrum blue
white peak that characterizes LED technology.
Speaker 1: That blue white peak absolutely screams artificial engineering. It does
not mimic starlight, it does not mimic fire. We are
essentially blinking a complex, color coded message into space every
twenty four hours as the Earth turns.
Speaker 2: If a civilization has been passively monitoring our solar system
for the last thousand years. The sudden explosive appearance of
night side illumination over the last century is the ultimate
dead giveaway of rapid exponential technological expansion.
Speaker 1: It proves definitively that we have mastered electricity, that we
have overcome the natural diurnal cycle of our biology, and
that we have established massive, permanent, resource hungry settlements.
Speaker 2: But there is a massive strategy vulnerability hidden in those
beautiful glowing maps, isn't there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, when I was reading this part, I got an
absolute chill.
Speaker 2: It is a profound vulnerability. Yes. By illuminating our cities
so brightly, we aren't just announcing that we have electricity.
We have conveniently and precisely highlighted our most densely populated
areas with billions of watts of light.
Speaker 1: We are handing any potential interstellar threat a perfect, highly illuminated,
topographically accurate map of our most vital and vulnerable infrastructure centers.
Speaker 2: Any hostile intelligence wouldn't need to guess where our population
is concentrated. They wouldn't need to scout where our industrial
capacity or political capitals lie. We have drawn a glowing blue,
white bulls eye around every major city on Earth.
Speaker 1: In our localized attempt to conquer the darkness of our
own world so we can drive at night and keep
our stores open. We have brightly illuminated our soft underbelly
for whatever might be watching from the unfathomable darkness of space.
Speaker 2: Here we are target New York, target London, target Tokyo.
So here are the exact coordinates of our highest population densities.
Speaker 1: It's terrifying when you reframe it from a strategic perspective,
but we aren't just altering the surface of the Earth.
In the last few years, we have begun radically changing
the space immediately around it. Let's look at the orbital
mega constellations.
Speaker 2: Ah yes, satellite swarms.
Speaker 1: In the last decade, there has been this absolute explosion
of thousands upon thousands of commercial communication satellites launched into
low Earth orbit to provide global Internet access. I want
to pause here and ask you to explain the mechanics
of the transit method, because when human astronomers use telescopes
like Tepler or James Webb to look for exoplanets, we
don't actually see the planet right.
Speaker 2: Usually know we watch for a tiny dip in a
star's brightness as a planet passes in front of it.
It's like measuring the shadow of a moth flying in
front of a distant street light.
Speaker 1: Are our new satellite swarms actually messing up our own
transit shadow?
Speaker 2: They absolutely are, and it represents a monumental shift in
how Earth presents itself of the wider galaxy. To explain
the transit method, simply imagine staring at a bright light
bulb from a mile away. You can't see a speck
of dust circling the bulb, But if that speck passes
directly between your eye and the bulb, the total amount
of light hitting your eye drops by a microscopic fraction
of a percent.
Speaker 1: And by graphing that tiny dip in light over time,
astronomers create a light curve.
Speaker 2: A natural, rocky planet with an atmosphere produces a very smooth, predictable,
uchased light curve as a transits across the star. But
we are currently in the process of building a highly
reflective metallic exoskeleton around our planet.
Speaker 1: So an alien civilization using the transit method to look
at Earth today would no longer see that smooth, natural
light curve as we deploy tens of thousands of flat, metallic,
highly reflective satellites into orbit to blanket the globe in
high speed connectivity. We are fundamentally altering our silhouette.
Speaker 2: Because the thousands of metallic satellites block and scatter the
sunlight differently than a smooth atmosphere.
Speaker 1: Would exactly, a densely packed mega constellation creates an irregular, jagged, fuzzy,
and mathematically unnatural transit signature. This swarm of artificial objects
scatters the starlight in erratic way. Is that a natural
atmosphere or even a system of natural moons or dust
rings simply cannot replicate physically? The math of the shadow changes.
Speaker 2: So when they look at our shadow passing across the sun,
our shadow looks fuzzy, jagged, and metallic. What does that
specific shadow tell them about our civilization?
Speaker 1: It communicates an immense amount of data. It showcases an explosive,
exponential phase of technological growth. The sudden appearance of a
massive orbital swarm around a previously quiet, rocky planet is
the undeniable fingerprint of a civilization achieving true space bearing status.
Speaker 2: It tells them we have mastered orbital mechanics, that we
have achieved mass production capabilities, and that we require global
networking bandwidth.
Speaker 1: But critically, it also reveals our severe limitations. It tells
them that we are still entirely confined to a single planet.
It shows that we are rapidly cluttering our immediate orbital environment,
risking a cascading debris event.
Speaker 2: And most importantly, it shows that our civilization is now
highly dependent on fragile, exposed orbital infrastructure. We are simultaneously
broadcasting our technological awakening and our immen's structural vulnerability.
Speaker 1: We have forged this shiny new high tech armour around
our planet, but we are completely trapped inside it. And
if someone or something breaks the armor, our entire global
communication network collapses. That is a sobering thought.
Speaker 2: It really is.
Speaker 1: Staying with this theme of light, optics and visibility, let's
look at the next evolution in our technology, optical lasers
and light sales. For the last century, radio waves were
our primary method of communication, but humanity is shifting. We
are moving toward optical technology because it can carry vastly
more data.
Speaker 2: We are beginning to use high powered lasers for deep
space communications, setting intense invisible beams to orbiters around the
Moon and Mars.
Speaker 1: And beyond just communication There are highly funded and vicious
projects currently being designed to use a rays of Diggawat
class lasers to physically push microscopic light sales to neighboring
star systems like Alpha Centauri.
Speaker 2: If radio leak from an airport is a whisper in
the dark and a planetary radar ping is a searchlight,
using a gigwat laser to push a physical sale across
the galaxy is like firing a cosmic flare gun directly
into the eye of whoever's looking.
Speaker 1: Isn't it cosmic flare gun is the perfect visualization. These
optical technologies represent a massive thrilling leap in human capability,
but they create an entirely new and incredibly dangerous mechanism
to accidentally reveal our exact location and technological prowess.
Speaker 2: To understand why lasers are so much more visible than
radio broadcasts, we have to look at how energy dissipates
radio waves obey the inverse square law. If you imagine
a balloon and you draw a smiley face on it
with a marker. As you blow the balloon up, the
ink spreads out, stretches, and becomes fainter and fainter until
you can barely see it.
Speaker 1: That is how radio waves travel through space. Their energy
dilutes as the sphere of the broadcast expand.
Speaker 2: But a laser does not dilute in the same way.
A laser is a tightly coherent beam of photons. It
is like putting a solid sticker on the balloon. No
matter how big the balloon gets, the sticker remains concentrated.
Speaker 1: The energy stays tightly packed together over massive distances.
Speaker 2: Yes, so if an alien civilization happens to be in
the exact line of sight of one of our high
powered optical communication beams or an array designed to push
a light sale, the signal they receive would not be
a faint whisper. It would be blindingly obvious to an
extraterrestrial optical telescope.
Speaker 1: Normally, from a distance, our sun looks like a standard, stable,
yellow dwarf star. It emits a broad spectrum of light
we call black body radiation.
Speaker 2: But if one of our deep space lasers momentarily sweeps
across an alien observer's field of view, our star would
suddenly appear to flash with an impossibly intense monochromatic spike
of light.
Speaker 1: A monochromatic spike meaning all the light in that flash
is exactly one specific color, one highly specific wavelength, and
stars simply do not do that.
Speaker 2: Stars cannot do that. A monochromatic spike of that magnitude
is a universal hallmark of advanced optical engineering. The sheer
physical power required to push a light sale to another
star system at a fraction the speed of light means
that the laser array firing it would outshine the entire Earth.
Speaker 1: In fact, in that specific laser wavelength, the beam would
outshine our entire Sun by orders of magnitude, So.
Speaker 2: It completely removes any ambiguity about our existence. You can't
look at a gigawaant monochromatic laser pulse that outshines a star,
They go, that's just a weird natural pulsar or a
dust cloud.
Speaker 1: It forces the issue entirely. An ambient radio leak could
theoretically be dismissed by cautious alien scientists as a bizarre,
unexplained astrophysical anomaly if the data isn't perfectly clear. But
a gigawat laser pulse at a highly specific singular wavelength
can only mean one thing. Intelligent life, life possessing vast
energy resources and significant orbital infrastructure.
Speaker 2: In our well intentioned attempt to quietly explore the nearby
stars with microscopic light sales, we risk casting an impossibly bright, undeniable,
and highly targeted spotlight directly onto our own fragile planet.
Speaker 1: We are lighting up our skies with high powered lasers.
We are wrapping our planet in swarms of metallic satellites,
and we are painting our continents with blue white LEDs.
But ironically, as our visual and optical footprint is absolutely
exploding into the cosmos, our oldest, most famous method of
cosmic communication is quietly vanishing.
Speaker 2: This brings us to our final point of exploration today
and honestly the one that gave me the most profound
existential chill when I was reviewing the research the temporal
paradox or the disappearing Radio window.
Speaker 1: Let's unpack the illusion of the radio window. For about
seventy years, humanity has been transmitting massive omnidirectional radio and
television signals into space. The sources paint this vivid picture
of an ever growing sphere of radio waves expanding outward
from Earth in all directions at the speed of light,
constantly announcing humanity's presence to the void.
Speaker 2: It is often referred to as the loud, leaky phase
of a civilization, and from a human perspective, it seems
like a very long time. Seventy years covers a massive
chunk of our modern history, from the end of World
War II, through the Cold War up to the dawn
of the Internet.
Speaker 1: But in cosmic terms, against the billions of years the
galaxy has existed, seventy years is less than a heartbeat.
It is a microscopic fraction of time. And the incredible
realization astronomers are coming to is that our window is
already closing.
Speaker 2: Because we are fundamentally shifting the foundation of our technology.
We are broadcasting huge, inefficient on the directional analog TV
signals from massive terrestrial towers anymore.
Speaker 1: We are transitioning our core communications to fiber optic cables
buried deep underground or laid across the ocean floor. We
are using tightly beamed satellite Internet exactly like the Mega
constellations we just discussed, which beam data to directly down
to the surface rather than out into space.
Speaker 2: We are using encrypted digital streaming services instead of blasting
high watted UHF waves. We are essentially drawing the blinds
on our own radio emissions. From a radio perspective, Earth
is going silent.
Speaker 1: This rapid technological shift creates a terrifying paradigm for SETI,
the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and profoundly alters our understanding
of our place in the universe. For decades, our entire
search strategy has been predicated on the assumption that if
aliens are out there, they must be broadcasting in radio frequencies,
just like we did in the twentieth century.
Speaker 2: We point our massive radio dishes at the sky, waiting
to intercept their version of television shows or their ambient
radar pings.
Speaker 1: But our own history is currently proving that this foundational
assumption might be entirely flawed. The loud, leaky radio phase
of technological development is incredibly brief. It is a stepping stone.
Speaker 2: If a civilization only leaks radio waves for seventy year
eight eighty years before figuring out how to enclose their
data in fiber optics, then they are only visible in
the radio spectrum for a fraction of a microsecond of
their planet's lifetime.
Speaker 1: So if every technological civilization follows a similar developmental path,
going from messy inefficient omnidirectional radio invention quickly transitioning to
highly efficient directed communication or enclosed fiber optics where the
light bounces around inside the glass and never escapes. Then
the mathematical probability of two civilizations overlapping in their loud
phase is basically zero.
Speaker 2: The probability becomes vanishingly small. We are inadvertently proving through
our own technological evolution that advanced civilizations don't stay loud
for long. They quiet down very quickly as a natural
byproduct of efficiency, And.
Speaker 1: This leads us to a much darker philosophical point often
discussed in relation to the Fermi paradox. Do these older
advanced civilizations quiet down merely through the pursuit of technological efficiency,
as we are doing with fiber optics, or is there
a darker, more intentional, more terrified desire to hide once
they realize the true nature of the universe.
Speaker 2: Once the civilization matures enough to understand the dark forest,
once they realize that the galaxy might be full of
silent apex predators, do they actively and aggressively suppress their
emissions to survive.
Speaker 1: But here's the thing that really gets me. Here is
the temporal paradox of the whole situation. We might be
transitioning to fiber optics, we might be quieting down now,
but that seventy light year wide bubble of our loud
phase is already out there. It has left the station because.
Speaker 2: It has been expanding in all directions for seventy years.
It is now a sphere one hundred and forty light
years in diameter, and it holds everything.
Speaker 1: It holds our early pop culture, our news broadcasts, the
radar signatures of our early wars, our intentional messages like
the Acibo broadcast. It is currently washing over thousands of
star systems right now as we speak, and we can
never ever pull it back.
Speaker 2: That is the immovable, unforgiving reality of the speed of light.
We are quietly shutting the door on our own radio emissions.
We are retreating into the safety of fiber optics and
targeted lasers, but the damage from a visibility standpoint is
already done.
Speaker 1: The sphere of our existence is expanding at one hundred
and eighty six thousand miles per second, completely indifferent to
our current attempts itself.
Speaker 2: Every single time we caught a commercial flight, every time
we sent a text message over a sprawling four G network.
Every time we cooled our homes with CFCs or mapped
an incoming asteroid to protect ourselves, we were acting as
an accidental cosmic megaphone.
Speaker 1: And now we are plunging back into the safety of
radio silence as a planet. But the echo is already
out there, traveling forever.
Speaker 2: If we returned to the scenario you painted at the
very beginning of our exploration, the flashlight in the dark forest,
it is as if humanity has finally realized that waving
the bright flashlight around is inherently dangerous.
Speaker 1: We have clicked the switch. We have turned the flashlight off.
We are trying to be quiet again, relying on our
enclosed fiber optic night vision.
Speaker 2: But in the pitch black, silent forest to the universe,
while waving that flashlight, humanity accidentally stepped on a massive
dry twig. The snap of that twig, our seventy years
of chaotic radio noise, our indestructible chemical CFC barcodes, our
blinding momentary radar blasts is traveling outward through the trees.
Speaker 1: Somewhere in the cosmos, something very old, very quiet, and
very patient may have already heard the snap. They may
have already received our signal. They may have already analyzed
our atmospheric smog, mapped our glowing blue white coastal cities,
and marked our exact planetary coordinates.
Speaker 2: We turned off the flashlight, but the snap of the
twig is already echoed into the deep woods. And all
we can do now, trapped in our single, rocky world,
is wait to see what hurt us.
Speaker 1: That is man, that's just profoundly haunting. But it's exactly
why we do these deep explorations, to pull ourselves out
of our daily routines and see our everyday world from
a completely different cosmic perspective, from the cell phone sitting
in your pocket, to the glow of your city streets
at night, to the way we track our airplanes. You
are an active part of humanity's accidental broadcast.
Speaker 2: It really changes how you look at a street lamp.
Speaker 1: It really does. So we want to hear directly from you.
We've covered a massive amount of conceptual ground today. We've
explored the two quadrillion watts of sweeping airport radar, the
geometric crosshairs and spillover of the deep space network, the
lingering undeniable neon signs of artificial CFCs, the glowing bullseyes
of our led city grids, and the blinding sun out
shining flashes of our planetary defense radar.
Speaker 2: So many ways to be seen.
Speaker 1: If you had a cosmic mute button and you could
instantly and permanently erase just one of these accidental beacons
from existence to protect Earth from whatever might be listening
in the dark forest. Which one would you choose to
silence and why?
Speaker 2: That's great question.
Speaker 1: Leave a commet below with your answer and your reasoning.
Would you shut down the radar and risk the asteroids?
Would you turn off the city lights and plunge us
back into the dark. Would you hide the Mega constellation?
We cannot wait to read your thoughts and debate your strategies.
Thank you for joining us on this journey into the unknown,
Stay curious, keep looking up, and join us next time
on thrilling Threads.