- Been here, done that in the '50s ...
Holy Smokes! The aliens would have to have very good aim to hit earth with a laser from light years away. You thought the US hitting a satellite with a missile was incredible? That would be child's play compared to trying to hit our tiny planet with a laser, repeatedly. They would have a hard time hitting our solar system repeatedly. Here is why:
Our entire galaxy is in motion. Everything in the galaxy is in motion and not all of the motion is directly relative to the other. The solar system is moving through our galaxy's arm. The arm of our galaxy (all the stars and stuff) are moving around our galaxy. Our earth is moving around our sun. AND all of this has to be timed so that the laser light has to be fired to where we will be when it gets to us in several light years (10 to 100?).
This is one of the reasons that communication and visitation between interstellar beings is unlikely.... space and time are a killer for neighbors. By the time one race realizes that another race could exist in another part of the galaxy, the information might be thousands of years old. It would take us a few thousand years to reach out to them (at light speed) with any sort of communique. We would have to calculate the communication shot to get to them a thousand years in the future.
By the time any species got around to visiting the other, one or both could likely be exinct. We have only been capable of interstellar communication (extremely limited) since about the 60s (40 years). We have only existed as intellectuals for about 10K years (and that's debatable).
If it takes us 2 thousand years to exchange an idea with an alien species, unless we figure out how to bend space (warp), there could be hundreds of thousands of other intelligent beings out there and we'll never be close enough to talk or visit before one race or the other or both no longer exist (say over hundreds of thousands or even millions of years in earth time).
Why not just put a message in the light. Isn’t that how fiber optic cables work?
Who knew, I've been seeing faint (and some not so faint) light signals every night when I check out the sky-this guys either a genius or a simpleton but whatever he is there's Sum Ting Wong, somewhere.
We can “laser spam” them! Who cares if they reply! Spam Spam Spam!
Hmmm unless all the alien civilizations that broadcast their presence like a lighthouse have been destroyed by other alien civilizations and the smart ones are the ones who stay quietly tucked away in their own corner of the universe.
(And yet most of ‘em probably disbelieve in God...and would dismiss the Bible as a symbolic ‘lighthouse’)
This is pretty stupid. A laser is a very pointed, directed, coherent beam. It doesn’t spread out. But that means that it has to be aimed with extreme accuracy, as another poster points out, taking into consideration the motion of our solar system and theirs, plus the time for the signal to travel.
When they receive 2 or 3 photons with regularity, they will cry “we discovered life on other planets”
You know, we’ve made attempts to contact alien civilizations. Of course, given the vast distances involved, they could hardly have succeeded yet, even if there are intelligences out there to receive them.
I wonder, though, do our scientists believe that these intelligences will be friendly. The known history of advanced civilizations contacting primitive ones has not been happy for the primitive ones.