We should build a solar lens telescope. By the time we're ready to use it, we'll have a bunch of candidates to point it at.
They’re building one for stars within 10 parsecs of the sun ( and more specifically for Alpha Centauri) which should launch in the next year
https://www.nasa.gov/general/direct-multipixel-imaging-and-s...
Though the 25km resolution mentioned actually sounds far, far better than the very pixellated planet in the "artist’s depiction". I suppose it depends how small and far away the planet is.
Couldn't you do something like a Hohmann transfer orbit ? As I understand it, adjusting the orbits far out there isn't as demanding as one might think (you don't have to spend the same energy you took to get out there to get into an orbit. Of course, this also means you will not be able to stay in one place and continuously map the same area, but you can map all the space within a disc?
It takes decades however to finish Hohmann transfers that far out apparently.
Rabbithole: Some calculations that may be entirely wrong would suggest that a <10000lbs spacecraft might be held "in place" for 100 yrs with a small fission reactor and an indium-based FEEP drive with about 15lbs propellant.
But first-- the price to get that circular orbit is steep, you end up imaging empty space for a lot of the time (no real way to "skip ahead") and your orbital speed vector makes you leave the observation cone for any interesting target pretty quickly.
In conclusion: You probably really want to stick with "one telescope probe per target system", and to give them one-shot orbits because those are cheap, reasonably fast and inside the observation cone (for your single target) for longer.
Basically you won't be reading license plates but you'd see enough to identify evidence of very large scale construction, and with multiple images over time I bet you could draw even more conclusions.
Of course, getting the telescope into place, steering it, etc. - that's the hard part.
Surely it has happened. They must have all spotted our planet millions of years ago and must be watching us with a continuous high-resolution feed. They've seen our dinosaurs. Their interest will really be piqued when they finally see us invent electricity, though that might be some time in the future for them.
Perhaps even gravitational lensing is primitive to them. Perhaps they're able to break and manipulate physics and peer directly into our light cone, breaking the speed of light. Perhaps through direct wormholes they're already here - computronium in the very oxygen atoms that surround us. In rock silicates, in the air you breathe, in your hemes, in your brain. Calculating.
But perhaps we're the only intelligent species in the entire universe. That is also a possibility. Some big names in astrophysics, such as David Kipping, suggest strongly that we should not rule out that hypothesis. I find his suggestions haunting and beautiful at the same time. You need to watch his videos, and this is a good start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqEmYU8Y_rI
And finally, it may be that we're all just a historical simulation. Or maybe that's ascribing too much importance to ourselves. Maybe we're just a slop simulation on some AI's plaything, existing for no reason at all. Background NPCs with self-importance, ephemeral existences. But procedural generation at scale isn't really all too different from the laws of the physical universe itself.
The scale of the universe fills me with awe. Every time I think about it, my worries about random algo-rage and clickbait fades away to nothing. It deeply contextualizes our short time here.
"Zeus sends the lightning, his wrath darkening the very sky," is an understandable model that connects "dark storm clouds" to a likely prediction of lightning.
That urge to explain the surprising, to find the pattern, leads directly to our understanding of the cosmos.
In fairness, this very often helps us understand the unknown thing more.
Currently we don't know a lot of things - but without trying out new ideas how are you ever going to know?
They may be planted by alien AI to lull us into false sense of security.
Effectively immortal organisms may be more impressive. Or those surviving in anaerobis boiling water conditions. Or fixing radiation defects like its nothing. Or vacuum. Or...
Artifical solar capture systems exist. Synthetic biology also bridges that gap as well and the genetic basis is known and has been manipulated. Granted, coming up with more efficient photosynthesis is very hard, but I don't share your "we humans are stupid" opinion here at all whatsoever.
> or butterfly metamorphosis
Nothing fascinating here. It is just a genetic program. Viruses have similar programs too - yes, no metamorphosis, but take retroviruses and the syncytium. Mammals only reproduce thanks to retroviruses (not 100% correct, but look at this here: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0707873105)
> or the fact that microbes can double their population in a few hours
Wow, we humans surely do not have cells that double. Oh wait ... nevermind. Humans consist of cells. Who would have thought...
Yes, microbes are much faster, but they don't have to coordinate as much as humans do in 3D, not even in a bacterial biofilm. And we have to double a lot more DNA than bacteria do, so of course they are faster.
> about a rose or a redwood tree than all the random and superficial activity the chimp brain produces
That comparison is weird. A rose is thinking as much as a chimp brain?
The human brain is special. Chimps are very clever too but humans have very solid abstract thinking. Animals have this too, to some extent (predator hunting prey, chimps have hunting strategies) but e. g. look at mathematics - animals don't waste their time coming up with higher order theorems.
> all the extraterrestrial AI swarms
Edit: My point is that you can't "build" such a thing and later point it somewhere-- you have to fly the camera part of the "telescope" about 3 times as far as voyager 1 went, exactly opposite of your observation target, and it is not gonna stay there for too long either.
As long as we improve rapidly at both drone-building and exoplanet target selection, it is not really gonna be worthwhile because both the drone hardware and the target will be hopelessly obsolete before we even get halfway to the observation point.
And if you circularize (which is expensive to do in delta-v), you minimize the time window you have for observation (because you're basically pointing your speed vector straight to outside of your observation cone).
For all intents and purposes, you'll be in the interstellar space.
Of course, the rocket equation often makes "just add a few percent more delta V" pretty hard ;)
But to "get there" within any reasonable timespan requires going really fast - which is currently highly impractical. And then once you get there, you have to them cancel pretty much all of that velocity which is not just a "few percent more delta V".
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20140013260/downloads/20...
You have to be so far because that's the minimal distance where the Einstein ring becomes larger than the Sun's apparent diameter.
I hope they did that eons ago so that I have a chance to see those images in my lifetime!
But that got me thinking, if an intelligence goes around collecting species, how would they keep their specimen populations from evolving? How could they possibly keep so many specimens alive over the eons?
Perhaps their strategy would be to take a vast amount of genetic samples and preserve those species as data. Rather than abduct dozens of T-Rexes for some zoo exhibit, they take the genomes from tens of thousands of T-Rexes and make a population snapshot. After they depart from Earth they could clone or create as many as they want, as needed.
Turning off the labels, aliens would probably assume that the world is naturally full of green stuff that is dealing with some strange grey infestation.
I think they would draw the correct conclusion, actually. I know it's popular to compare humans to mold or cancer or whatever these days, but this kind of thing is both unrealistic and insulting to the aliens, who by the definition of the scenario are at least as smart as we are, quite probably more.
But what is the actual source?
https://www.snexplores.org/article/idea-would-turn-earth-gia...
I started a new thread for further discussion:
…would you? The lensing would occur right at the apparent surface of the sun.