Exoplanet hunters may find ET by glut of alien corpses

[cronus]

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2 ... nK7pHDp03k

Exoplanet hunters may find ET by glut of alien corpses

Little green men on alien planets may be discovered even once they have died out, especially if their demise was sudden. So suggests a model of our world after the sun becomes a red giant.

Earth's grim future emerged last year when Jack O'Malley-James of the University of St Andrews, UK, and colleagues modelled the sun's expansion into a red giant. As Earth heats up in 1 billion years' time, animals and plants die, leaving microbes as the only survivors. As complex life is likely to exist for relatively short periods on alien planets too, this seemed to lower the odds of us finding them before they die out.

Now the team has modelled the gases produced by a die-off and microbial take-over, and it turns out that aliens could still be detected after mass extinction. Bizarrely, the most promising scenario is sudden extinction.

In the team's projections, a glut of corpses produces a spike in the smelly gas methanethiol. This only hangs around for 350 years but it converts to the more persistent ethane. So a planet high in ethane could be a sign of a post-apocalyptic world, once home to complex life.

(continued)

[klr]

Run out of terrestrial disasters, have we?

[cronus]

[Faithfree]

So we've only got a billion years till nature calls last drinks. I think I''ll try to keep my panic level to low for the time being.

[cronus]

So we've only got a billion years till nature calls last drinks. I think I''ll try to keep my panic level to low for the time being.

Yeah, but the sudden population crash of a imploding technological species leads to a pungent signature detectable elsewhere across the cosmos much, much sooner and closer.

[Clinton Huxley]

Leading to the question - Aliens, what do they smell like? Seriously?

[colubridae]

Leading to the question - Aliens, what do they smell like? Seriously?

Or taste like? God gave us dominion over the animals. Does that mean aliens as well?

[Clinton Huxley]

Leading to the question - Aliens, what do they smell like? Seriously?

Or taste like? God gave us dominion over the animals. Does that mean aliens as well?

You have to catch the buggers first. And you can't eat them on a Friday, unless they are waterworld aliens.

[mistermack]

This only hangs around for 350 years but it converts to the more persistent ethane. So a planet high in ethane could be a sign of a post-apocalyptic world, once home to complex life.

(continued)

It could also be a sign of nothing of the sort.
Titan, a moon of Saturn, has large LAKES of ethane. And our Sun hasn't gone to red yet.
And as far as I know, we have about four and a half billion years left, with the Sun as a main sequence star, not one billion. I got a bit worried, when I read that.

[laklak]

Jeez MM, everybody knows Titan was actually a Reptilian mothership that got caught in Saturn's gravity well when their Abercrombie & Fitch drives melted down.

[mistermack]

Jeez MM, everybody knows Titan was actually a Reptilian mothership that got caught in Saturn's gravity well when their Abercrombie & Fitch drives melted down.

Dammit, nobody tells me anything.
Serves me right for using wikipedia for information. I was warned, but would I listen?