Detecting alien radio broadcasts is impossible.
Then why are scientists trying to do it?
Because it's possible.
Thanks internet!
It's not the rest of our faults you can't follow a conversation. Here is the original post.
I dunno, seems to be intelligent life is pretty god damn rare. How manyanomalous radio signals have we found anywhere in the universe? I would think if there are other intelligent beings out there or have ever been out there we couldeasilyknow of their existence by theirradio communication.
Though I seriously whenever we finally get around to really exploring Mars or Europa/Enceledus we find at least fossils of bacteria or something. Something to cause the religions to implode on themselves.
He asked why we can't
easilyknow of their radio
communication, as in, why we haven't detected the large amount of radio communication a sufficiently advanced society would throw out. I responded that due to the inverse square law,
suchcommunications would not be detectable. As in signals used for
standard communication on a planet. This is the only type of communication that there is enough of, to be "easily" detectable (As in the universe would be awash in it)
ifwe COULD detect it, but we can't.
The only way
ANYcommunication would be detectable would be if it were aimed
directlyat us, with enough energy to communicate with us (Which, as you can see, the universe wouldn't exactly be awash in). And the only way we would "hear" that is if we had a radio-scope pointed
DIRECTLYat the area where it emanated from. This is not "
easy", at all, it's not something that we could pick up without the aliens specifically
wantingto communicate with us. Hence why, as we explained, there could be millions of civilizations out there spilling radio waves into the space, and we'd never know--which is why it's possible we've never heard an "anomalous" signal before, even if I Love Alien Lucy is playing on a thousand worlds; because listening for it is
NOT easy. Which is why your statement about "BUT SETI AT BERKLEY??!!!" had absolutely nothing to do with the conversation. Nothing those SETI programs are doing is easy; it requires the coordination of orbital satellites, and various computers, in order to detect planets, that have only become available very recently. And even then, it STILL requires an alien race with sufficient advancement to SEND us a signal (And a hail mary signal at that).
So, the only communication with the
quantityto be "easily" seen--standard planetary communication (As in, Contact showing the Olympic games--which was stated in the original posts)--can
NOTbe heard by us. However, what CAN be heard by us, is EXTREMELY difficult to find, and requires cooperation of an alien race that wouldn't even know we existed and was only sending something because they knew a planet, capable of supporting water, existed in this area.
if(t[e].getAttribute('data-cfhash'))return t[e]}();if(t&&(c=t.previousSibling)){p=t.parentNode;if(a=c.getAttribute('data-cfemail')){for(e='',r='0x'+a.substr(0,2)|0,n=2;a.length-n;n+=2)e+='%'+('0'+('0x'+a.substr(n,2)^r).toString(16)).slice(-2);p.replaceChild(document.createTextNode(decodeURIComponent(e)),c)}p.removeChild(t)}}catch(u){}}()/* ]]> */on my home computer, though I have for a long time wondered if that isn't just an NSA front to crowd-compute the hacking of strong government encryptions lol.
