If Earth Were an Exoplanet, Would James Webb Detect Life? 

We also need to remember that due to the vast distances between star systems, the earth may look quite different from what it looks like today. Someone 100 -200 light years away would detect a slightly different earth verses someone 4.2 light years away in the Alpha Centauri System.

I think there was a magazine cover back in the 1970s, the cover of Nature I think, with a photo of earth from space and the headline asking "Is There Life On Earth?". Carl Sagan was involved in the thought experiment and the conclusion was similar: it's really hard to detect life when observing from space.

I'm early quick think of a joke Two guys enter a bar, one says "I'll have some H2O", the other guy says "I'll have some H2O too!" The second guy later dies

For me, the most interesting take away here is the likelihood that we would be missed altogether because of the presence of our gigantic neighbours.

Don't forget we see the past and not the present when we look to the stars and planets. It would be same for them..

what a coincidence, i was wondering whether or not aliens could look at earth and find life just yesterday

We can walk on the beach but we dont inspect every grain of sand

God bless you anton I hope your family is well, your a great content creator!

The light of the first caveman campfire hasn’t made it to 99% of the stars we see in the sky. Not even close.

Dude you're amazing! I wish most content creators had half the quality of your research and videos, it's incredible! Wish you the best

This is a super approachable, yet complex way of asking the question

Another thoughtful and well reasoned video. Thank you

If alien civilizations detects "the "human biosignature", they most probably will running screaming away and point their telescopes otherwhere.

Just wanted to wish you that you are doing well, Anton.

It is highly highly unlikely that extraterrestrial life will have the same technology as us. If they are curious enough to wonder about life on our own planet they are probably far more advanced. Merely 60 years ago the jury was still out about life on Mars, because our telescopes were too blurry to know for sure.

This reminds of a conversation between a 5 year old girl and her mother. - mummy? - Yes? - can i tell you something? - Of course sweety!! - the person reading this is reading it with our voices. - what? Are you sure? -. Yep

"I always feel like... soooomebody's watching me" 🎶🎵

As oxygen is a very reactive gas, its presence in large quantity indicates that something is regenerating it. This would be by far the easiest unusual gas to find in Earth's atmosphere. The quantity of oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere is around 10^18 kg which is very difficult to explain without life.

Doing multiple observations over time, should let you detect patterns in the variations. With careful analysis you should be able to learn a lot from the variations.

What hope do we have if a thin, thin film of liquid, partially covering the surface can have such an obscuring effect?

How about a light signature from the surface of the planet?

In the Sci-Fi shows they make it sound so easy. "Life signs detected" or "No life signs detected". Like there's a magic box that can tell if something is alive. I always found it a bit dubious but I suspended my disbelief because narrative is fun.

This is the quickest I've caught one of your videos. I am SPIDER-MAN

i think if its very very difficult just a few light years away, then its not likely ever, unless we do a stepping stone galactic expansion over a long period of time. we have to go there to be sure its not an inorganic process that we are seeing.

Ozone exists in our atmosphere naturally because of sunlight's effect, and a few other processes, like lightning, on ordinary diatomic oxygen, but free oxygen is in our atmosphere only because of photosynthetic life forms. Without plants, algae, photosynthetic bacteria and other photosynthetic life, there would be no oxygen. The absence of oxygen would not rule out life, but its presence seems to me a pretty sure sign, since oxygen is too reactive to persist in the atmosphere without constant replenishment.

I just shared ur channel with another cosmic nerd. I enjoy your channel more than all the other ones as I appreciate your research and succinct way you present this amazing info. Thanks from Vancouver Canada Anton💪

Thanks for breaking that down, very interesting

Fortunately some great minds came up with/favor the Rare Earth Hypothesis and the Fermi-Paradoxon. We still can't determine potential life with no means whatsoever - even in our close neighbourhood, but some geniuses figured (with no evidence at all) that life in our galaxy is probably sparse. Awesome!

Considering how advanced telescopes have become in the last 500 years we must consider what they might be like in ten thousand years. That is what might be peering in our direction right now. We might be advertising ourselves rather garishly.

Do people here know that if there was an exact copy of Earth orbiting Proxima Centauri at 4.2 light years that we can't detect life there at our current technology level?

A chief NASA scientist said that there are ZERO exoplanet candidates for life that JWST will be able to characterize. Yet people continued to go on and on about discovering life with JWST this way...

but shouldn't we be able to at least discount the effect of land vs water, because the Earth would complete multiple 24-hour rotations as it transits across the sun? and cloud cover too, as it changes almost hourly? Like the measurements would average after a certain amount of time? (tidal lock isn't applicable imo since such a planet would be very different from Earth and impossible to compare to the forms of life we have here)

Awesome content....

looking at the number of nukes detonated in the US and Pacific alone makes me think we are more than noticed :)

I'd be pissed if I was Australia. All alone on EqP. Everyone else is partying on EqA and poor Australia is like the guest sitting in the corner.

If a alien looks at us when we look at them one of us will be in the past. So we can see them. That would be a time travel telescope.

Thank you Anton for making this happen today. I know it is a lot of work, and so I’m thankful for you making these Amazing episodes and I Hope you and your family are doing well .

yes, but they have to do it quickly!

What if alien's observes us on radio wavelength ? I suppose we could be a bit brighter than other planet ?

Assuming aliens view Earth during a transit: 1. aliens only see the Earth from the east/west side. Not the poles 2. aliens would always see the same season from their distant perspective * is it true?

"Picks up the severed head of the Rare Earth Hypothesis while laughing maniacally into it's dead face."- Osmosis Jones

I think the biggest thing standing in the way of discovering new life is bio signatures. Who just decided that all life in the universe must exist the way we live. Like we are literally just discovering that some plants have photo receptors and we are trying to say aliens cant exist without oxygen? It’s a joke imo

Very interesting topic!

I was so excited to see you cover this topic. I had just been wondering about this recently myself.

O2 would be enough to convince me. No need to worry about parts per trillion industrial gases.

👋🏽…hello wonderful Anton!

What if we write a bonfire message that says, "Wonderful People"?

Anton, congratulations on the well deserved achievement of 1 million wonderful subscribers 👏

if they recieve our signals, they will think the movies are real events, thinking "no uh uh we aint going to contact cus they have to many problems"

One day in the future an alien civilization may find 1 of the Voyager spacecrafts & will get to know the best of humanity - thanks to Carl Sagan!

Doesn't it seem absurd we lend so much credence to an idea like the Fermi Paradox when in all reality we have no idea how we would even detect life on an exoplanet? Life could exist all over the place and we wouldn't know one way or the other.

If alien telescopes millions of lightyears away are looking at the earth right now, theyre seeing dinosaurs munching grass and well, each other.

What about radio astronomy? Can't radio frequencies reveal more and interesting molecules in the atmosphere from a distance, or is it exceptionally difficult to focus radio wavelengths from such a tiny target like an exo-atmosphere?

Believing Earth is well known throughout this universe .

To add to your video - if the air is stagnant, you can get a large build up of CO2 from cities, so2 from industry and volcanoes, and NO2 from burning plant material. and of course oxygen and nitrogen should probably be similar to here on earth, perhaps another inert gas instead of nitrogen is present such as argon or neon alongside oxygen, however it would still most likely be nitrogen gas since lightning strikes here fix n2 into a useable form.

Most likely earth certainly would not look like what it is now

So even if there was a planet that had life similar enough to life we're familiar with, chances are that we won't even be able to tell. Sucks

On the next deep space mission NASA or ESA ought to put those same instruments on that probe and then take a look back at Earth. That should give them some idea of what to look for at a distance.

We are perfectly hidden. Unless you have a telescope of mind boggling size and can watch a planet's surface in 'real past-time'.

So the answer to Fermi's Paradox is; over there! You're already looking at them!

Look and see if there is any light emissions i.e street lighting if their technology is similarly advanced as humans.

They would definitely detect my biogasses...oh, see what I did.

only the planets 300 light years away or closer could see our technology signatures ,thats if they recognize our specific way we have developed or recognize our radio transition technology ,we dont for theres so far...

Isn't it that CO2, methane, N2O and some other simple hydrocarbons exists naturally without the need for life? Many moons of Jupiter and Saturn contain a lot of these elements but we do not strongly associate them with life but just that with these elements life is in the realm of possibility.

I also appreciate your new hair cut ☺️. Awesome information as always.

What we see is not what we get, everything we see is in the past. Some of the planets and stars we see now are already gone. Some planets that appear to be dead may be teeming with life at this moment in time. We should look close to home for alien life.

With how long it takes light too travel.. I doubt it

When you do those slow pans it means things go off the screen

We don't have a baseline to compare to. We have no info about what an earth without life would look like.

When the space aliens fly past the Earth I'm sure they make sure their doors are locked 🔒

how about detecting radio signals?

Nah, we just login to youtube

You would not be able to see seasonal changes. As an external viewer you see the planet always at the same spot on its orbit around the star. Only when it passes the star you can scan for gases. Correct me if I'm not right.

i really like your haircut bro

Wonderful as always anton. Thank you. 😊🙏

If there are chemicals in our atmosphere which can ONLY be present because of Industrial or Technological activity that have particular 'signatures' that could be detectable by machines like the James Webb Telescope, or other telescopes, then surely we ought to be searching for similar in other 'exoplanets' discovered so far?

awesome vid man

Almost as we are "hided" here for some reason.

What if we're just one of the first civilizations in the galaxy?

What if James Webb peeks at an exoplanet, and sees an eye staring back at him?

If the otherside interstellar curious species are not using a massive folding fragile mirror, not only infared vision & slightly more zoom range + real color. Then they have already discovered life in this world.

Best channel on RU-vid period!

Most probably already have done and probably along time ago at that

It seems like we’d be able to detect the presence of oceans and continents and the duration of a day by looking for variations over a day in the light curve.

Something crazy might have on November 18 2022

If they an intelligent, or advanced Aliens they would notice earth isn't built up, and transmitting all kinds of radio, satellite signals lol ❤️👍

There is a famous expression: Walk too long in the middle of the road and you get run over.

I always imagined why aliens didnt contact us was because they happen to observe earth be violent assaulted by a rock and the domiant species go from bad times to valuable fuel.

Actually if they looked at us it would be seeing our planet millions of years ago.

Fantastic! 0ne of the best episodes that I have seen lately. It gave me a completely different perspective of what I had imagined of the studies that are underway with James Webb. I had imagined that it would be a question of time for us to find traces of life in other planets. Now I understand that the time in question may be much longer that I had supposed and even so it is quite possible that we wont be completely sure that life exists or not.

Only if they have a telescope 90 lightyears across, or they use there star a a telescope (ring effect) ~ A solar gravitational lens (or solar gravity lens) (SGL) gravitational lensing.

I'd suggest the obvious giveaway is ordinary molecular oxygen. Oxygen does not survive long with something resupplying it. If you found methane and oxygen together, I can't see any other explanation but life.

Provided they r searching for us...

Yes. You are Welcome. Here for any other questions you might have.

I'm guessing the answer is not "no, the end."

Unfortunately this would have to be a probably "No" answer and for a couple of reasons. While we have detected and analyzed many exoplanets and their general chemical compounds and signatures, their mass, orbital location and planet rotation and other factors it's all been in the vaguest and general sense. Even though we have some advanced tech we still don't have the tech to see the fine detail. Example; take any exoplanet we've found and say we've detected a large quantity of Carbon monoxide. Can we then sit back and say that that planet has a bunch of carbon burning devices on it creating all of that Carbon monoxide so that means it has some sort of intelligent life on it? No we cannot. Another reason for that "No" answer is time and space. How far away would these aliens be from our star system 50 ly's, 100, 200, maybe 500 or more? If they were 500 light years away they would see the earth as it was 500 years ago. That is if they can even focus in on it considering the domination of Jupiter and Saturn, the Heliosphere, the Ort cloud and Kuiper belt and their line of sight. Depending on that "line of sight" they may not even be able to see our planet let alone check it for signs of life. Our sun dominates this system with a ruthless iron fist with a fairly deep gravitational well holding all of that stuff out there together and coating our system with a thick blanket of solar winds and radiation. Even if you were in the Alpha Centauri system at a little more than 4 ly's away it would be very difficult to single out the Earth and filter out all of the stuff that actually protects the Earth from outside observers.

Every time I get tired of the bullshit I watch Anton 🙌🏼

Did they say that JWST could detect 'artificial' light on an exoplanet?

ok so we're safe from alien invasion if they can't find us. this is good news!

They can technically see us coming from a billion miles away ... we are moving through space.