Back to the radio transmissions. Shouldn't there be thousands if not hundreds of thousands of civilizations just here in the good old Milky Way all of them developing and fading away at different rates so that at a stage of their development comparable to ours in radio that their transmissions would be reaching us now? Unless all that black matter that we can't account for is absorbing those transmissions we should have a large number of radio hot spots just in our own galaxy. If I remember correctly that is what they expected when they switched on that big radio telescope in Porto Rico.
Sometimes I wonder if our civilization was the only civilization to discover radio waves. Such a fascinating topic, and discoveries come from everywhere and everything. What if there are twenty billion different means of communication? Our civilization discovered only two or three thus far. Verbal, radio, then light. May have missed one or twenty billion different methods.
Shouldn't there be thousands if not hundreds of thousands of civilizations just here in the good old Milky Way all of them developing and fading away at different rates so that at a stage of their development comparable to ours in radio that their transmissions would be reaching us now? Unless all that black matter that we can't account for is absorbing those transmissions...
I agree with both premises. I think radio transmissions get diluted and lost among the background noise emanated by stars, quasars, radioactive gases, planets, nebulae, etc. I'm no scientist, but in my opinion, radio is a terrible medium for interstellar, or even interplanetary communication.
I think you'd want to send communications in a precisely directed manner, using a medium that is something like a tight beam that exceeds the speed of light. Now, that would be a neat trick, given that you and the recipient are both in motion, relative to the stars and planets.
But --- if you imagine a straight line between the transmission point and the receipt point, you can begin to get the idea that they could perhaps lock onto each other, thereby having that one stable line as their path of communication. Even though both points are in motion, it wouldn't matter, because the line of contact between them remains stable in relative terms. Hmm....