Posted on 01/26/2010 7:48:50 AM PST by JoeProBono
EARTH is becoming "invisible" to aliens, the world's leading ET hunter claimed yesterday. Dr Frank Drake said transmission of signals into space was being cut by the digital revolution.
As a result, any little green men on other planets would not be able to detect them.
Dr Drake said Earth was surrounded by a 50 light year-wide "shell" of radiation from analogue TV, radio and radar transmissions. The signals had spread far enough to reach nearby star systems but are vanishing.
He explained that while old-style TV transmissions could generate one million watts, digital transmissions are much weaker.
And satellites aim their transmissions to Earth - with almost none being allowed to escape into space.
Dr Drake said: "Now the actual amount of radiation escaping is about two watts, not much more than you get from a cell phone.
"If this continues into the future, very soon our world will become undetectable."
Dr Drake said he believed that intelligent life DOES exist beyond Earth.
He reckoned alien civilisations were likely to be far more advanced than ours and that their analogue TV age probably went long ago. That in turn means that the world's search for their signals is that much harder.
Dr Drake - who founded US-based organisation SETI (Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence) 50 years ago - told a meeting at The Royal Society in London: "We're going to have to search many more stars and many more frequencies."
Very interesting point that extraterrestrials may not be emitting anything we can detect, either. Oh well.
Anybody that might be listening would know why the earth is beginning to become quiet.
However, its probably best if we don’t attract any attention. Better to get a covert look at them first. Hopefully they’re dumb, edible, and slow.
NOBODY with the brains and talent to need to communicate across cosmic distances would do so with radio waves or any other sort of electromagnetic radiation. That would be like me trying to get messages to Germany by splashing stones in Baltimore harbor and hoping the Germans could read the message on the ripple waves when they got there. The whole premise of SETI is idiotic and a colossal waste of money.
Maybe Viagra and they'll SEE All Us!
WOOF!
It doesn’t really make any sense that they would be using radio. Space is radio signal noisy.
I always had the vision of us scanning the horizon with binoculars looking for smoke signals while the aliens are transmitting digital radio.
Expect a visit soon.
Aliens are just now reciving Dick Clark’s Bandstand show.
They would detect us the same way we would detect them - by noting our oxygen rich atmosphere.
You're hoping that the aliens are Shmoo?
The Star Trek universe had a race of beings on a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri, which was roughly at the same technological stage we are, except that at some point, they developed a paranoid streak, so all their communication and entertainment was through landline, and most of their civilization was underground, thus explaining why we never saw or heard of them. Except for the underground thing, we’re pretty close to that as well. A lot of the news and entertainment we consume these days travels across the internet instead of the air, and what little we still push through the air is of such low wattage that it may not be making it past the ionosphere.
Communications to and from the moon during the Apollo missions was very effectively conducted on not much more than 1/4 of a watt.
Of course, there wasn't anyone else using that frequency at the time. But still....
BS. Old-style transmissions are undetectable after a few light-years anyway. The nearest star is 4 light years away.
(What is stronger? the signal or the background noise?)
Well.......okay, then.
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