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

James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) would be able to spot signs of intelligent life on Earth if it was spying on us from another star system in the Milky Way.

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

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.