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To: Norm Lenhart
I think that transmission is probably in a bubble so vast that by now it contains hundreds of stars*. OTHO, it's so faint by now as to be utterly undetectable.

Detectable signals probably have only reached a few scores of stars. Odds are we haven't gotten a recognizable transmission to any technological civilization.

Worse, the first signals anyone is apt to receive aren't coherent broadcasts, they aren't 'easily' decoded entertainment radio or TV, they are powerful early warning radar transmissions, and those consist of randomly (or as close to randomly as we could achieve) modulated signals, the better to prevent spoofing.

Even if someone happened to be looking here in the correct radio band, and at the correct time, they'd just get literally meaningless noise!

*Average distance between stars in our neck of the woods is something like 5 light years. In the roughly 100 years we've been broadcasting that bubble has about 400 stars.

56 posted on 05/13/2014 4:26:03 PM PDT by null and void (When was the last time you heard anyone say: "It's a free country"?)
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To: null and void

If you read my earlier post, we’ve transmitted an about 200 light-year bubble from random radio transmissions. Only about 80-year bubble for actual transmissions. (Though these have been directed, so they’re stronger but MUCH less likely to hit something. Like a grenade vs a rifle.) So detectable signals probably haven’t even actually hit anything. Put to the size scale, there are only ~30 planets on the 50 closest stars (within 16 light-years) per Google “closest stars”. Most of these planets aren’t even close to habitable, either gaseous supergiants, or just barren rock (lava). It would probably take you 100s if not thousands of light-years to find a planet similar to ours that could possibly have similar life.


60 posted on 05/14/2014 12:27:32 PM PDT by Svartalfiar
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