Today's best telescopes could see the amount of light produced by Tokyo from as far away as the Kuiper Belt. Future telescopes may be able to hunt for alien civilizations by looking for artificial lighting. (Via Gary King)

  • Paul Renault

    “Future telescopes may be able to hunt for likely extinct  alien civilizations by looking for artificial lighting. “

  • machinestate

    wow… and unless earth starts emitting something faster than light, we’ll be likely long gone before anyone else finds any currently-existing trace of our civilization

    • Finnagain

      Is it Debbie Downer Day? I thought we liked Thursdays.

  • proginoskes

    Kuiper Belt : distant star systems… that’s like five orders of magnitude. You’re gonna need a BIG mirror!

  • Getefix

    Bug zapper.

  • bcsizemo

    Hell with that amount of light pollution it is no wonder we have to place our telescopes in space.

    /sarcasm
    The obvious next step is to start working on subspace communications.
    sarcasm/

  • howaboutthisdangit

    So how long until we can eavesdrop on their WiFi?