James Webb Space Telescope could detect life on Earth from across the galaxy, new study suggests

Harry BakerSeptember 15, 2023

“A new study suggests that the James Webb Space Telescope could detect Earth's human civilization from across the galaxy (Image credit: James Vaughan)

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) would be able to spot the signs of our civilization on Earth if it was spying on us from another star system in the Milky Way, a new study shows. 

The finding raises hopes that the state-of-the-art spacecraft could detect alien civilizations as it stares out toward distant worlds in our galaxy.

Since launching in late 2021, has been predominantly peering out into the in search of clues about how the early universe formed. But one of the telescope's secondary objectives is to analyze the atmospheres of nearby exoplanets, or planets beyond the solar system, to look for gases produced by biological life, known as biosignatures, and chemicals produced by advanced alien civilizations, known as technosignatures.

Related: 

Measuring the expansion rate of the Universe - Hubble constant tension explained

But despite being the most advanced telescope currently in operation, it is still unclear how well JWST will be able to spot the tell-tale signs of intelligent life. To answer this question, researchers decided to test whether the space telescope could successfully detect intelligent life from the only planet in the universe that is known to be both habitable and currently inhabited — Earth.

In the new study, uploaded to the pre-print server on Aug. 28, researchers took a spectrum of Earth's atmosphere and deliberately decreased the quality of the data to mimic how it would look to an observer dozens of light-years away. The team then used a computer model, which replicated JWST's sensor capabilities, to see if the spacecraft could detect the key biosignatures and technosignatures from the dataset, such as methane and oxygen, produced by biological life, and nitrogen dioxide and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which are produced by humans.

The results, which have not yet been peer-reviewed, show that JWST could likely detect all the key markers of non-intelligent and intelligent life in our planet's atmosphere.

This graph shows the raw atmospheric data used in the new study. Specific biosignatures and technosignatures are highlighted in different colors. (Image credit: Lustig-Yaeger, et al)

The researchers noted that the quality of the altered dataset is roughly equivalent to JWST observations of planets from — a star system containing seven exoplanets that orbit a red dwarf star around 40 light-years from Earth. This suggests the telescope should be able to detect life or alien civilizations on exoplanets within 40 light-years of Earth. But the team believes JWST could possibly detect signs of extraterrestrial life up to 50 light-years from Earth.

Only around 20 have been officially discovered within a 50-light-year radius of Earth, but based on the number of suspected stars in this region of space, experts predict that there may actually be as many as 4,000 exoplanets within JWST's reach, according to , an international astronomical collaboration dedicated to finding potentially habitable planets close to Earth.

However, this doesn't guarantee that JWST would be able to detect life on other planets.

An artist's interpretation of what the TRAPPIST-1 system might look like. (Image credit: Getty Images)

Detecting biosignatures and technosignatures on other worlds "may prove challenging to interpret without contextual knowledge about the habitable environment," the researchers wrote. In this study, the team already knew which markers to look for, but on an exoplanet with different conditions and alternate potential life forms or technologies those life-signatures may not be as obvious, they added.

JWST has already made some interesting discoveries about exoplanets near Earth. The telescope , which is around 40 light-years from Earth, and found that TRAPPIST-1b, the second-closest exoplanet to the star in the TRAPPIST-1 system, due to its extreme heat. The spacecraft also glimpsed a , a "super-Jupiter" exoplanet 40 light-years from Earth.

Closer to home, JWST has also detected , which could contain the chemical ingredients needed for life. And further out into the cosmos, the spacecraft has also more than 1,000 light-years from Earth.

to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: 

Get the Space.com Newsletter

Breaking space news, the latest updates on rocket launches, skywatching events and more!

Harry is a U.K.-based staff writer at Live Science. He studied Marine Biology at the University of Exeter (Penryn campus) and after graduating started his own blog site "Marine Madness," which he continues to run with other ocean enthusiasts. He is also interested in evolution, climate change, robots, space exploration, environmental conservation and anything that's been fossilized. When not at work he can be found watching sci-fi films, playing old Pokemon games or running (probably slower than he'd like). 

Latest

Most Popular

By September 15, 2023

By September 15, 2023

By September 15, 2023

Russian rocket launches 3 spaceflyers for up to yearlong stay on ISS (video)

By Robert Z. PearlmanSeptember 15, 2023

Hubble telescope spots glowing galactic disk floating in deep space (photo)

By Samantha MathewsonSeptember 15, 2023

NASA's Juno mission captures stunning view of Jupiter with its volcanic moon, Io (photo)

By Samantha MathewsonSeptember 15, 2023

Watch the inspiring true story of NASA astronaut José Hernández in 'A Million Miles Away' on Amazon Prime (video)

By Brett TingleySeptember 15, 2023

Perseverance rover spies 'avocado' rock on Mars (photo)

By Samantha MathewsonSeptember 15, 2023

Satellites reveal how deadly Morocco earthquake moved ground (photos)

By Tereza PultarovaSeptember 15, 2023

Why is Neptune's moon Triton so weird? “

iPhone 15 VS iPhone 15 Pro Max

iPhone 15 Pro Hands-On with NEW Features!

AirPods Pro 2 w/ USB-C + Apple Vision Pro = Lossless Audio. Wait, What?!

iPhone 15/15 Pro Impressions: Not Just USB-C!

Why the 15in M2 MacBook Air is Hard to Recommend | But I still Love it!

AirPods Pro 2 Review: 1 Underrated Thing!

The Technology Facebook and Google Didn’t Dare Release - The New York Times

The Technology Facebook and Google Didn’t Dare Release

"Engineers at the tech giants built tools years ago that could put a name to any face but, for once, Silicon Valley did not want to move fast and break things.

Sept. 9, 2023

By Shira Inbar

By Kashmir Hill

Kashmir Hill covers technology for The New York Times. She is the author of “Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup’s Quest to End Privacy as We Know It,” from which this article is adapted.

One afternoon in early 2017, at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., an engineer named Tommer Leyvand sat in a conference room with a smartphone standing on the brim of his baseball cap. Rubber bands helped anchor it in place with the camera facing out. The absurd hat-phone, a particularly uncool version of the future, contained a secret tool known only to a small group of employees. What it could do was remarkable.

The handful of men in the room were laughing and speaking over one another in excitement, as captured in a video taken that day, until one of them asked for quiet. The room went silent; the demo was underway.

Mr. Leyvand turned toward a man across the table from him. The smartphone’s camera lens — round, black, unblinking — hovered above Mr. Leyvand’s forehead like a Cyclops eye as it took in the face before it. Two seconds later, a robotic female voice declared, “Zach Howard.”

“That’s me,” confirmed Mr. Howard, a mechanical engineer.

An employee who saw the tech demonstration thought it was supposed to be a joke. But when the phone started correctly calling out names, he found it creepy, like something out of a dystopian movie.

The person-identifying hat-phone would be a godsend for someone with vision problems or face blindness, but it was risky. Facebook’s previous deployment of facial recognition technology, to help people tag friends in photos, had caused an outcry from privacy advocates and led to a class-action lawsuit in Illinois in 2015 that ultimately cost the company $650 million.

With technology like that on Mr. Leyvand’s head, Facebook could prevent users from ever forgetting a colleague’s name, give a reminder at a cocktail party that an acquaintance had kids to ask about or help find someone at a crowded conference. However, six years later, the company now known as Meta has not released a version of that product and Mr. Leyvand has departed for Apple to work on its Vision Pro augmented reality glasses.

In recent years, the start-ups Clearview AI and PimEyes have pushed the boundaries of what the public thought was possible by releasing face search engines paired with millions of photos from the public web (PimEyes) or even billions (Clearview). With these tools, available to the police in the case of Clearview AI and the public at large in the case of PimEyes, a snapshot of someone can be used to find other online photos where that face appears, potentially revealing a name, social media profiles or information a person would never want to be linked to publicly, such as risqué photos.

What these start-ups had done wasn’t a technological breakthrough; it was an ethical one. Tech giants had developed the ability to recognize unknown people’s faces years earlier, but had chosen to hold the technology back, deciding that the most extreme version — putting a name to a stranger’s face — was too dangerous to make widely available.

Now that the taboo has been broken, facial recognition technology could become ubiquitous. Currently used by the police to solve crimes, authoritarian governments to monitor their citizens and businesses to keep out their enemies, it may soon be a tool in all our hands, an app on our phone — or in augmented reality glasses — that would usher in a world with no strangers.

The Clearview AI co-founder Hoan Ton-That wearing the A.R. glasses version of Clearview AI.Kashmir Hill/The New York Times

‘We decided to stop’

As early as 2011, a Google engineer revealed he had been working on a tool to Google someone’s face and bring up other online photos of them. Months later, Google’s chairman, Eric Schmidt, said in an onstage interview that Google “built that technology, and we withheld it.”

“As far as I know, it’s the only technology that Google built and, after looking at it, we decided to stop,” Mr. Schmidt said.

Advertently or not, the tech giants also helped hold the technology back from general circulation by snapping up the most advanced start-ups that offered it. In 2010, Apple bought a promising Swedish facial recognition company called Polar Rose. In 2011, Google acquired a U.S. face recognition company popular with federal agencies called PittPatt. And in 2012, Facebook purchased the Israeli company Face.com. In each case, the new owners shut down the acquired companies’ services to outsiders. The Silicon Valley heavyweights were the de facto gatekeepers for how and whether the tech would be used.

Facebook, Google and Apple deployed facial recognition technology in what they considered to be relatively benign ways: as a security tool to unlock a smartphone, a more efficient way to tag known friends in photos and an organizational tool to categorize smartphone photos by the faces of the people in them.

In the last few years, though, the gates have been trampled by smaller, more aggressive companies, such as Clearview AI and PimEyes. What allowed the shift was the open-source nature of neural network technology, which now underpins most artificial intelligence software.

Understanding the path of facial recognition technology will help us navigate what is to come with other advancements in A.I., such as image- and text-generation tools. The power to decide what they can and can’t do will increasingly be determined by anyone with a bit of tech savvy, who may not pay heed to what the general public considers acceptable.

‘Standing on the shoulders of giants’

How did we get to this point where someone can spot a “hot dad” on a Manhattan sidewalk and then use PimEyes to try to find out who he is and where he works? The short answer is a combination of free code shared online, a vast array of public photos, academic papers explaining how to put it all together and a cavalier attitude toward laws governing privacy.

The Clearview AI co-founder Hoan Ton-That, who led his company’s technological development, had no special background in biometrics. Before Clearview AI, he made Facebook quizzes, iPhone games and silly apps, such as “Trump Hair” to make a person in a photo appear to be coifed like the former president.

In his quest to create a groundbreaking and more lucrative app, Mr. Ton-That turned to free online resources, such as OpenFace — a “face recognition library” created by a group at Carnegie Mellon University. The code library was available on GitHub, with a warning: “Please use responsibly!”

“We do not support the use of this project in applications that violate privacy and security,” read the statement. “We are using this to help cognitively impaired users sense and understand the world around them.”

It was a noble request but completely unenforceable.

Mr. Ton-That got the OpenFace code up and running, but it wasn’t perfect, so he kept searching, wandering through the academic literature and code repositories, trying out this and that to see what worked. He was like a person walking through an orchard, sampling the fruit of decades of research, ripe for the picking and gloriously free.

“I couldn’t have done it if I had to build it from scratch,” he said, name-dropping some of the researchers who had advanced computer vision and artificial intelligence, including Geoffrey Hinton, “the godfather of A.I.” “I was standing on the shoulders of giants.”

Mr. Ton-That is still building. Clearview has developed a version of its app that works with augmented reality glasses, a more fully formed realization of the face-calling hat that the Facebook engineering team had rigged up years earlier.

The end of anonymity

Mr. Ton-That demonstrates the company’s facial recognition software using a photo of himself.Seth Wenig/Associated Press

The $999 pair of augmented reality glasses, made by a company called Vuzix, connects the wearer to Clearview’s database of 30 billion faces. Clearview’s A.R. app, which can identity someone up to 10 feet away, is not yet publicly available, but the Air Force has provided funding for its possible use at military bases.

On a fall afternoon, Mr. Ton-That demonstrated the glasses for me at his spokeswoman’s apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, putting them on and looking toward me.

“Ooooh, 176 photos,” he said. “Aspen Ideas Festival. Kashmir Hill,” he read from the image caption on one of the photos that came up.

Then he handed the glasses to me. I put them on. Though they looked clunky, they were lightweight and fit naturally. Mr. Ton-That said he had tried out other augmented reality glasses, but these had performed best. “They’ve got a new version coming,” he said. “And they’ll look cooler, more hipster.”

When I looked at Mr. Ton-That through the glasses, a green circle appeared around his face. I tapped a touch pad at my right temple. A message came up on a square display that only I could see on the right lens of the glasses: “Searching …”

And then the square filled with photos of him, a caption beneath each one. I scrolled through them using the touch pad. I tapped to select one that read “Clearview CEO, Hoan Ton-That;” it included a link that showed me that it had come from Clearview’s website.

I looked at his spokeswoman, searched her face, and 49 photos came up, including one with a client that she asked me not to mention. This casually revealed just how intrusive a search of someone’s face can be, even for a person whose job is to get the world to embrace this technology.

I wanted to take the glasses outside to see how they worked on people I didn’t actually know, but Mr. Ton-That said we couldn’t, both because the glasses required a Wi-Fi connection and because someone might recognize him and realize immediately what the glasses were and what they could do.

It didn’t frighten me, though I knew it should. It was clear that people who own a tool like this will inevitably have power over those who don’t. But there was a certain thrill in seeing it work, like a magic trick successfully performed.

A lost opportunity?

Andrew Bosworth, chief technology officer of Meta, said that face recognition was “hugely controversial” and that granting broad access to it was “a debate we need to have with the public.”David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

Meta has been working for years on its own augmented reality glasses. In an internal meeting in early 2021, the company’s chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, said he would love to equip them with facial recognition capabilities.

In a recording of the internal meeting, Mr. Bosworth said that leaving facial recognition out of augmented reality glasses was a lost opportunity for enhancing human memory. He talked about the universal experience of going to a dinner party and seeing someone you know but failing to recall their name.

“We could put a little name tag on them,” he said in the recording, with a short chuckle. “We could. We have that ability.”

But he expressed concern about the legality of offering such a tool. Buzzfeed reported on his remarks at the time. In response, Mr. Bosworth said that face recognition was “hugely controversial” and that granting broad access to it was “a debate we need to have with the public.”

While Meta’s augmented reality glasses are still in development, the company shut down the facial recognition system deployed on Facebook to tag friends in photos and deleted the more than one billion face prints it had created of its users.

It would be easy enough to turn such a system back on. When I asked a Meta spokesman about Mr. Bosworth’s comments and whether the company might put facial recognition into its augmented reality glasses one day, he would not rule out the possibility."

The Technology Facebook and Google Didn’t Dare Release - The New York Times

DJI OSMO ACTION 4 vs GOPRO HERO 12 | Which Action Camera to buy in 2023?...