Worried About Evil Aliens? Humans Could Use Lasers To Hide Earth, But It May Be Too Late

What if there are aliens out there? And what if those aliens are scouring space for other intelligent beings? And what if our sci-fi nightmares come true and they find us, overtake our planet, and enslave the human race?

Don’t worry, two scientists have us covered. Thinking of all those terrifying “what ifs,” astronomer David Kipping and graduate student Alex Teachy believe they could hide Earth from hostile aliens using lasers, NBC News reported.

This doomsday scenario is a dim possibility, but it’s better to be prepared for the worst. After all, Stephen Hawking thinks it’s wise for humans to hide Earth from aliens and not broadcast our presence into space.

“We essentially played the thought experiment that if we really had xenophobic tendencies and wanted to avoid the Earth being discovered, could we hide the Earth from alien planet-hunters?” Kipping said. “I started to think about lasers. Most people might have stopped there, because the sun emits so much light — how could you possibly produce a laser beam which could ever compete with the sun? But it turns out, when you actually run through the equations, it’s really not that bad.”

Physicists have designed a laser defence system to cloak Earth from bad-guy aliens… https://t.co/qa1AkjyVkK pic.twitter.com/Zkmmedkfgj

— ScienceAlert (@ScienceAlert) April 1, 2016

Kipping came up with his idea to use lasers to hide Earth after learning about the dimming star found by NASA’s Kepler space telescope, which inspired fantastical speculation that the signal came from an “alien megastructure” orbiting the star.

While such a megastructure is likely not the cause, it made the astronomer think about how humans could fiddle with the signals it beams into space, including those created every time the Earth orbits the sun.

To hide us from malicious aliens, he theorized that we could easily erase Earth’s signal, distort it, or even eliminate any signs of life. The only caveat is that we’d need to know where the aliens are in order to shoot our cloaking laser at the right spot.

Kipping’s “thought experiment” is rooted in how we humans find other planets, a process called the transit method. Kepler has found 1,000 planets this way: it watches for the shadow a planet casts when it passes in front of its star in orbit, creating a dip in the brightness of the star, Popular Science explained.

This shadow indirectly points out a planet. And if aliens are as smart as we are (and worse, much smarter), they may be seeking out other planets in this way, too. And if that’s true, we need to figure out how to mask the shadow the Earth creates when it passes by the sun so we can hide from snooping extra-terrestrials.

“To make it look like the planet is not there at all, you’ve got to get rid of that dip. You’ve got to fill in the missing starlight.”

These researchers believe lasers are the answer. To hide our very hospitable planet, we could shoot lasers into their alien eyeballs, cloaking us. We’d only need to power up the lasers for 10 hours per year, when we zip past the sun.

The lasers would only require the same amount of energy as it takes to power 40 homes.

“We could build this next week if we wanted to,” Teachey said.

To get even trickier and hide the Earth more effectively, we could employ lasers that mimic the wavelengths found in sunlight. This would require more power, but it would hide Earth’s biosignatures and made our home “look like a boring dull lifeless world,” Kipping added.

But is all this effort for naught? Seth Shostak, director of the agency actively hunting for alien life — Center for SETI Research — thinks using lasers to hide Earth is coming a little too late, according to CNN.

“If they’ve already found Earth, and then suddenly see it ‘disappear,’ that’s a signal that we’re here. We’ve been broadcasting our presence into space since World War II with TV, FM radio and radar. These signals could be picked up by advanced aliens. Even hostile ones. But there’s no point in worrying about it. We’ve already told the cosmos we’re here.”

[Photo By adike/Shutterstock]