"SETI: A New Kind of ‘Water Hole’" Topic

"Some of you may recall an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which the inhabitants of a planet called Aldea use a planetary defense system that includes a cloaking device. The episode, "When the Bough Breaks," at one point shows the view from the Enterprise's screens as the entire planet swims into view. My vague recollection of that show was triggered by the paper we looked at yesterday, in which David Kipping and Alex Teachey discuss transit light curves and the ability of a civilization to alter them.

After all, if an extraterrestrial culture would prefer not to be seen, a natural thought would be to conceal its transits from worlds that should be able to detect them along the plane of the ecliptic. Light curves could be manipulated by lasers, and as we saw yesterday, the method could serve either to enhance a transit, thus creating a form of METI signaling, or to conceal one. In the latter case, the civilization would want to create a change in brightness that would essentially cancel out the transit light curve. It's not exactly a ‘cloaking device,' but it ought to work…"
Full article here
centauri-dreams.org/?p=35370

Amicalement
Armand

Sounds good in theory at first glance.

However, I suspect that for most starfaring races, it most likely won't do much good, since even we primitive humans frequently detect planets by their gravitational effects on other bodies in a solar system, so……

That was my first thought as well.

To cloak a planet, you'd have to block out the entire electromagnetic spectrum
which would then be conspicuous by its absence.

At one time,there was a theory that posited large numbers of Dyson Spheres as an explanation of dark matter. Of course that applies to entire solar systems,rather than single planets.