Why scientists think we could find extraterrestrial intelligence by searching for pollutants

At this very moment, the long-anticipated James Webb Telescope is situated a million miles from Earth, preparing its mirrors and instrumentation for this summer when its observations will finally begin. RELATED: Somewhere on Earth, an ozone-destroying supervillain is hard at work Misra said he and his colleagues not only wanted to determine the extent to which they could search for CFCs in nearby planetary systems with current and near-future technology— like JWST— but they also wanted to encourage " broader thinking" about searching for intelligent extraterrestrial life on other planets. "Searching TRAPPIST-1e for CFCs with JWST would require significant observing time, but this might be comparable to the time that would be required to search for biosignatures like oxygen," Misra said. "If we saw pollution in the atmosphere of an exoplanet, such as CFCs, this would be compelling evidence for extraterrestrial technology," Misra said. "It is also worth noting that any extraterrestrial technology that we observe will probably need to have been around for a long time in order for us to observe it, this means that a polluted exoplanet atmosphere would probably have to be in a continual state of pollution for us to see it," Misra said.