Planetary scientist Matthew Clement of the Carnegie Institution’s Earth and Planetary Laboratory and his colleagues claim that aliens can alert us to their presence by moving planets around, inverse.com reports .
Experts claim that an alien civilization can organize entire solar systems of planets. They can also bombard moons and planets with asteroids to alter their orbits and signal their presence, planetary scientists say.
According to astronomer Matthew Clement, this ambitious planetary reshuffle will be an opportunity for extraterrestrials to announce their presence to us.
In a recent article in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Clement and his colleagues suggest that a sufficiently powerful and motivated extraterrestrial civilization could create entire solar systems with planets.
Planetary scientists think it could be done with an asteroid-sized object. To do this, it will be enough to direct it on the right trajectory in order to influence other planets through gravitational shocks, gradually moving them into different orbits.
“It actually happens,” Clement tells Inverse. “We are quite confident that the giant planets of the solar system moved significantly after their formation, as they had repeated flybys with residual debris and with elements like Pluto. »
Scientists believe doing such a thing is not entirely out of the realm of science fiction. According to Clement, there has already been much speculation about using the gravitational pull of another small object to steer an asteroid into a closer orbit for mining.
And we already use the same principle today to launch spacecraft into more distant orbits (or send them outside the solar system).
“It would take millions of years for an asteroid or multiple asteroids to move a planet-sized object the distance [necessary],” Clement says. This is an order of magnitude longer than the very existence of our species.
“But if you’re a more advanced civilization, maybe you can think of timescales of a million years. »
A technologically advanced alien culture might find a way to apply gravity to an entire planet to alter its orbit.
While it’s hard for us to imagine how to do this, Clement argues that in terms of clean energy needs, any civilization tech-savvy enough to harness most or all of its star’s energy could do so in a matter of seconds. more than two (earth) years.
“You have to take into account that any civilization can only spread for a short period of time,” says Clement.
Some technologies can survive their creators – for example, our radio transmissions will propagate through space long after we are gone, and the Lageos satellites (a pair of laser reflectors in a very stable orbit 5,900 kilometers above Earth) will probably remain in orbit longer than the Earth will remain habitable.