Posted on 04/05/2005 9:36:50 AM PDT by LibWhacker
I don't discount the possibility that it's an urban legend, but given the fact that over just a few decades the amount of radio energy has increased so much I'd expect it to be noticed, IF it's reached any other world with the technology that could see it.
Not quite. Anything below 1GHz gets attenuated pretty quickly. Our TV broadcasts would not even be noticed as far out as the nearest star. What is worse is that interstellar scintillation pretty much destroys any of the modulation characteristics leaving only the narrowband carrier. This is why SETI looks for narrowband carriers sans modulation. So "I Love Lucy" is going to the stars (except as microwave digital streams that are uplinked to the TV satellites only).
Dimensional travellers, rather than "life on other planets"..
The "sleeping prophet", Edgar Cayce claimed in one of his "sessions" that humanity would indeed, meet intelligent life some day..
But it would be 10's of thousands of years from now, and they would be so far beyond us that we would consider them as god-like, and we would be completely beyond their notice..
That's pretty humiliating, isn't it?
To finally find life in the universe and find out you are no more than ants beneath their feet?
Great tag-line, by the way..
Or as Captain Picard observed, "Any tecnology sufficiently advanced beyond our own would be indistinguishable from magic."
Being a computer geek, I prefer the corrolary that any technology that is distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced.
placemarker
Think!
If you were from a technologically advanced civilzation many, many light years distant from here, would you waste you time on this violent collection of scientific wannabes, when in all probablilty there's so much more to be had out there?
How could you trust a "civilization" that is brutal to it's own?
How could you approach a people who have seen fit to irridate their own planet - not just once, but many times?
How comfortable could you feel with an ignorant mass of collected races that seemingly have been thrown together haphazardly, and can't find it in themselves to get along?
How confident would you be with a world that has just scratched the surface of scientific possibilities and whose first option to your visit is more likely than not going to be militaristic?
With each passing year I become more and more convinced we live in a really bad galactic neighborhood, and until such time as we get our sh*t together, we won't be graced with a visit from these guys any time soon.
And in passing, I don't think warp technology is the answer to interstellar apace travel. At some point it might serve as a semi-useful bridge technology, but I really think they'd use something else more efficient.
Just my thoughts...
CA....
"The universe is one big place"
I don't think many people have a good grasp of what a light year is.
How much would a spaceship cost (even a speed of light job) and a trip? Would an alien society be willing to pay for that? For what, to experiment on humans? GMAB.
I could see satellite travelers, broadcasting, but it would take many, many years for one to get anywhere distant from its source.
Absolutely! :-)
or maybe Alien Boy Scouts, err Person Scouts.
If Pickard said it, he got it from Arthur Clarke.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of The Future, 1961.
Or maybe the opposite is true. We are the peaceful, ecologically sensitive ones that ate technologically superior by comparison. One civillization must be the most advanced. It could be us.
Oh, they're plenty advanced. They just can't afford the phone bill.
Therefore, no other earths can exist.
Plenty of "Earths", little intelligent life.
I watch Stargate, I knew that!
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