What would the Earth look like to an alien civilization located light years away? A team of researchers from Mauritius and Manchester University has used crowd-sourced data to simulate radio leakage from mobile towers and predict what an alien civilization might detect from various nearby stars, including Barnard's star, six light years away from Earth. Ramiro Saide, currently an intern at the SETI Institute's Hat Creek Radio Observatory and M.Phils. student at the University of Mauritius, generated models displaying the radio power that these civilizations would receive as the Earth rotates and the towers rise and set. Saide believes that unless an alien civilization is much more advanced than ours, they would have difficulty detecting the current levels of mobile tower radio leakage from Earth. However, the team suggests that some technical civilizations are likely to have much more sensitive receiving systems than we do, and the detectability of our mobile systems will increase substantially as we move to much more powerful broadband systems.
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