How aliens inadvertantly signal us.

[PB666]

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/09/alien-nuclear-wars-might-be-visible-from-earth/404176/?utm_source=SFTwitter

I gonna say, no, not likely. If a nuclear blast did occur how would differentiate form say a bizarre asteroid impct which occurs thousand times more frequently in the life of a planet.

[SargeRho]

If I'm not mistaken, Asteroid Impacts and Nuclear Explosions have unique EM signatures.

[PB666]

If I'm not mistaken, Asteroid Impacts and Nuclear Explosions have unique EM signatures.

they do, but asteroids produce alot of radioactive Iridium. We assume that thier nuclear bombs use the same technology as our plutonium, uranium, of hydrogen bombs. To see that precise signal you would have to be looking at them in the gamma ray spectrum. Our gamma ray observatories are quite rare. So more typically our high resolution cameras are visible and IR, and so then you would be interpreting bright flashes of a planet in transect, which is more or less a sampling per unit time, going by the planet hunter plots, with the solar variation. No, sry, i dont think so. Maybe if we had the telescope mentioned in the other thread that could see earth like planets directly, then its possible. Light scattering is the inverse forth power of the wavelegth so getting really high resolution gamma ray chromatography is not at trivial task.

[RainDreamer]

I think if aliens signal us,I think it might be something like a mimic of our own radio signals. They won't be likely to understand our own signal, but if they detect intelligence in the signal pattern and want to signal back that they received it, they will try to mimic our own signals so we know that our signal is received. A ping back.

But nuclear wars works too if signalling other intelligences are not their intention. Provide we are lucky enough to catch it in time.

[YNM]

The sun is producing hundreds of yottawats, or hundreds of yottajoule a second, almost all in visible spectrum, yet it'll be pretty dim after tens of lightyears. A nuclear blast doesn't go way higher than that, also to note their gamma-ray and X-ray spectrum - surely hard to detect from a few lightyears away, not to mention you can't see any nuclear explosion, no matter how large (unless it detonates the whole planet anyway) in America from SE Asia (or vice versa or something else like that).

[Darnok]

We didn't made any nuclear tests beyond Earth? I mean beyond Earth magnetic field... so maybe there is somekind of radiation we didn't found yet?

[YNM]

We didn't made any nuclear tests beyond Earth? I mean beyond Earth magnetic field... so maybe there is somekind of radiation we didn't found yet?

We did. Granted it was tested just for the resulting EMP...

[Darnok]

We did. Granted it was tested just for the resulting EMP...

Hmm but those are still very close to Earth, I was asking about same tests beyond Van Allen belts.

[magnemoe]

The sun is producing hundreds of yottawats, or hundreds of yottajoule a second, almost all in visible spectrum, yet it'll be pretty dim after tens of lightyears. A nuclear blast doesn't go way higher than that, also to note their gamma-ray and X-ray spectrum - surely hard to detect from a few lightyears away, not to mention you can't see any nuclear explosion, no matter how large (unless it detonates the whole planet anyway) in America from SE Asia (or vice versa or something else like that).

yes, gamma and x-rays are hard to pinpoint, think most get absorbed by atmosphere too.

Last nuclear wars are rare, wonder if we could detect an high power orion pulse drive, think asteroid tugs, probably more common.

Bomb size is an issue in both scenarios, large bombs are large as our accuracy improved standard bomb size went down to less than half an megaton.

[ZetaX]

We didn't made any nuclear tests beyond Earth? I mean beyond Earth magnetic field... so maybe there is somekind of radiation we didn't found yet?

There is EM. Light, photons, magnetic fields, hat kind of stuff. And a few highly accelerated atoms/ions/electons. That's it. The exact composition might vary a bit, but we know very well what happens.

[baggers]

http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/elon-musk-says-nuking-mars-is-the-quickest-way-to-make-it-livable/

"The fast way [to jump-start climate change on Mars] is to drop thermonuclear weapons over the poles," Musk said, straightfaced.

According to this thread, seem a good idea in many ways.