[blueplum]

I’d argue that, as a planet, we haven’t gone ‘dark’ at all.

“we” as in the US and Europe, don’t shine our city lights because we’ve been green-guilted and white-privileged into going dark. To our detriment, as dark cities encourage crime.

But have you seen the fingerprint of China and greater Asia? Their urban areas are lit up like neon Christmas trees all night long! Which makes one wonder? Why are we ‘saving the night sky’ when 8.5billion other people aren’t? To signal how virtuous we are?

As to radio waves - back to the 9 billion people, every little town around the world now has a radio or tv station, licensed or not, most broadcasting 24 hours. Not to mention ham radio broadcasts, podcasts and internet. Even remote areas of the world have satellite links. That’s a whole lot more white noise than existed in 1950, when tv stations went off the air at midnight, there was no internet and ham operators were few and far between. There’s a peak right behind me that we jokingly call an alien base it has so many microwave receivers/repeaters. And then there’s skylink, which will theoretically enable internet from any point on earth and will quadruple bandwidth use. And militaries around the world with their own dedicated bands. We are a lot noisier, and brighter now than ever before.

We are a society that has spent trillions trying to disprove intelligent design. It’s time to put that hypothesis to bed.

[Svartalfiar]

As to radio waves - back to the 9 billion people, every little town around the world now has a radio or tv station, licensed or not, most broadcasting 24 hours. Not to mention ham radio broadcasts, podcasts and internet. Even remote areas of the world have satellite links. That’s a whole lot more white noise than existed in 1950, when tv stations went off the air at midnight, there was no internet and ham operators were few and far between. There’s a peak right behind me that we jokingly call an alien base it has so many microwave receivers/repeaters. And then there’s skylink, which will theoretically enable internet from any point on earth and will quadruple bandwidth use. And militaries around the world with their own dedicated bands. We are a lot noisier, and brighter now than ever before.

Are we though? Sure we're "noisier", but does that actually translate into actual noise in the galaxy? EMR power drops with the cube of the distance (if I remember correctly), so even the Aricebo signal is weaker than the galaxy's background radiation by now, and that has barely made it past part of our small arm of the Milky Way, much less the rest of the galaxy.