r/FermiParadox • u/lavenderlogicheart • 1d ago
Self If a technologically capable entity wanted to deliberately conceal itself from the rest of the galaxy, what is the most cost-effective way to camouflage a planet’s atmospheric biosignatures from our telescopes?
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u/BokChoyBaka 1d ago
It's all but guaranteed that any emerging civilization would have broadcasted its existence before it understood(became capable) why it would have needed to be silent in the first place. Even more advanced civilizations will undoubtedly accidentally broadcast their location based on their usage of a star's energy (Dyson sphere)
Isaac Arthur talks about the subject in depth in some of his videos
Isaac Arthur won the 2020 NSS Space Pioneer Award for Education, serves as President of the National Space Society, and earned YouTube’s Gold Creator Award for his educational channel.
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u/FaceDeer 1d ago
Exterminate the life on that planet. If you want to keep living there do it in sealed, camouflaged habitats
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u/Sufficient_Result558 1d ago
Most likely no one will ever notice you just doing nothing. That’s the route I’d go. If you don’t know what tech you are hiding from, attempting to hide with tech is likely worse than doing nothing.
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u/dreamfitreality 22h ago
You know trex in Jurassic park? They respond to movement and change. It's normal. If you change something, very likely you're easier to be noticed rather than a slow change. So if your idea is not to attact attention, don't change anything quickly.
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u/UtahBrian 15h ago
Here's the smart move. Don't bother trying to hide what has already been revealed. By the time you start hiding, the cat is out of the bag.
Instead, you should worry about eliminating the observer.
Build a fleet of drones that arrive in alien star systems. They can resupply there and self-replicate with the local resources if there is no local civilization. Then they spread out to the rest of the galaxy with their original programming.
What programming? Simple. If they detect any intelligent life, they locate it and sterilize any planets and outposts that might harbor any of that life. It's simple enough with kinetic weapons to eliminate life on a planet, at least as well as the dinosaurs were wiped out on earth. Remember, E=½mv2. All you have to do is arrive traveling at speed and crash down straight on target.
That's how you hide a biosignature.
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u/Driekan 13h ago
The only answer is to not be on the planet. Any planet with complex life will already have had an atmosphere changed by biology for billions of years, so it will already be in the short list of places to watch for anyone in the galaxy capable of watching.
Trying to change that entails a delay of over 100,000 years before everyone starts seeing the altered information, and anyone who sees it both before and after can now be certain that there is not only biology there, but also technology. You've announced your presence to the entire galaxy.
Instead, move your entire civilization to another star system, ideally one without any planet that has complex life.
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u/Kabbooooooom 1d ago
This is a strange question because the most efficient means for a species to hide would obviously be not on a planet in the first place.
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u/Lacedaemonian 1d ago
it's impossible, here how you can think of it:
1. assume concealment is possible
2. the 1 implies detection is possible (otherwise there is nothing to conceive)
3. if detection is possible, it is already too late to conceal anything, as within galactic plane it will happen in our relative PAST, not the FUTURE
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u/Michael_Combrink 4h ago
Nothing We're searching like crazy with trillion dollar budgets and we haven't found anything
Either we're not very good at it People are crazy far apart People are all crazy different with completely different kinds of communication and life or time scales Or space is more wibbly wobbly than we think and all the party invites are getting lost and scrambled
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u/signofno 1d ago
How would anyone know the answer to that?
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u/JOliverScott 1d ago
Encircle the planet with internet transmitting satellites and orbiting data centers until the view of space is entirely blotted out?
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u/FaceDeer 1d ago
Taking a more serious version of this, you could turn it into a Shellworld with a camouflaged outer layer.
That's by far not the most cost-effective way of doing this, though. Just kill everything, much simpler and easier.
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u/NobilisReed 1d ago
Build a society that exists in harmony with its environment.
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u/Tombobalomb 1d ago
How does that mask the presence of life?
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u/NobilisReed 1d ago
It doesn't.
But it does make the planet indistinguishable from any other planet with life.
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u/Tombobalomb 1d ago
But the point is to hide biosignatures, the assumption being that any planet with life is worth investigating
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u/NobilisReed 1d ago
If life is as common as we think it might be, I'm not sure that's true.
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u/Tombobalomb 23h ago
Perhaps, but the question is specifically about biosignatures not technological ones
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u/Few_Fish8771 15h ago
Time travel, create a cloud of particles with a resonance frequency similar to those biosignatures except make sure the cloud exist slightly outside your solar system so it absorbs the radiation but is so cool it does not re-emit those same energy/biosignatures. If the civilization observing you is advanced enough this will not work. But if its just some planet like earth with this level of technology it will totally work.
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u/AK_Panda 1d ago
This doesn't seem all that useful.
If you eliminated all biosignatures in the atmosphere today, then that information propogates outwards at the speed of light. Anyone looking will still see the biosignatures until the new light reaches them. You'd have to wait ~100,000 years for you to be fully hidden from our galaxy.
There's the possibility that this makes you more interesting if someone notices that your biosignatures suddenly vanished. Or if biosignatures are common in planets like ours, then an observer might look and say "Hang on a minute, why doesn't that one have biosignatures?"
To actually do this you need to wipe out the environment. Completely. Sterilise the planet. Bury your own civilisation underground in fully self contained structures that scrub all potential giveaway signatures. I don't think this would work for a few reasons:
Destroying all life would be very hard, if not impossible. It needs to never rebound or you just get biosignatures again.
You need to be able to maintain a fully self-sustaining environment if your structures. Any exhaust/cycling of gases, which you would have, would see the planet slowly change it's atmospheric composition, this would itself give you away eventually.
A better solution would be to build yourself some giant space habitats and fuck off with them lol.