ANCIENT ORIGINS - While we have yet to identify life on any other planet or anywhere else in space, a new study has revealed the telltale signs which could indicate a planet being inhabited.
Researchers at the University of California, Riverside (UCR) discovered that greenhouse gases, much like the ones emitted by our very own planet, could potentially mean that a distant world has been terraformed or at least, artificially altered for hosting life.
These key signatures identified by researchers are methane, ethane, and propane, alongside gases made of nitrogen and fluorine, or sulfur and fluorine which could hint to technology-utilizing life forms. The gases proposed are used on Earth in industrial applications such as manufacturing computer chips.
According to Edward Schwieterman, a UCR astrobiologist and lead study author:
“For us, these are bad because we don’t want to increase warming.
But they’d be good for a civilization that perhaps wanted to forestall an impending ice age or terraform an otherwise uninhabitable planet in their system, as humans have proposed for Mars.”