A collaborative study conducted by a group of scientists from the University of Mauritius and the University of Manchester has employed crowd-sourced data to model the radio signals emanating from cellular towers, with the aim of speculating what such a distant civilization could potentially perceive from a range of proximate stars. This includes Barnard’s Star, situated a mere six light years from our planet.
Ramiro Saide, an intern at the SETI Institute’s Hat Creek Radio Observatory and a postgraduate student at the University of Mauritius, has developed models that represent the radio frequency power these extraterrestrial societies 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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