Using the Moon as a Mirror Reveals What a Living Planet Looks Like

This is one of those articles that gets overlooked that I really feel hints at what will be one of the most important events of the next century.

It is only a matter of decades before we identify life on another planet by spectroscopy of it's atmosphere, a technique that is illustrated in this article. The event will be one of the major events of human history, yet few seem aware of how close we are to this happening.

You don't have to go somewhere to know if there is life there. The light has already been their and now it's here. It's just a matter of reading the light to find out if it interacted with biological molecules there.

That's really interesting. I wonder if the mixture of gases observed could be evidence of industrialization? (Lots of carbon particulates in the air would absorb light in carbon's band gap, maybe?)

Come to that, those guys were looking at light that had shone through the Earth's atmosphere, and then bounced off the Moon. So that light was missing the wavelengths within the band gaps of the carbonates and silicates on the Moon's surface, as well as the wavelengths absorbed by the gases and creating the transmission spectra. I guess there was no overlap?

So that technique is different than what we would actually be doing with other stars.

And actually, I wonder if diffraction and refraction effects wouldn't create a kind of rainbow projected onto the Moon. The different wavelengths of light would be bent to different degrees. I don't know if the effects would just confined to a narrow fringe around Earth's shadow, or if it would create a bulls-eye effect deep within the shadow. That wouldn't be a problem looking at other planets, of course.