Posted on 11/08/2001 7:52:53 AM PST by MeekOneGOP
Love this. I am going to use it myself with your permission! :)
Two things: 1. The s/n ratio goes through the roof as we shrink our detection into narrower and narrower bands. 2. We are looking a millions and sometimes billions of frequencies simultaneously.
OK, I can buy that. So how much do we gain in signal strength advantage if we don't need to decode modulation? Could we pick up Pioneer 10 at 1 watt from 5 billion miles away? I think we just lost it recently and I thought it was around 5-7 billion miles away and transmitting at more than 1 but less than 10 watts.
By all means. Tell 'em who said it, and maybe I'll end up in Bartlett's someday. Or not.
Guaranteed you get the credit! :)
They found it again in April, after missing it for 8 months. Its signal strength is about 8 Watts. It's about 7.5 billion miles away.
Good, then that is an excellent example of our sensitivity limit. So at 10 billion miles we need about 12.5 watts from an 8 foot dish. I'm assuming that Pioneer's dish is about 8 feet. So at 1 ly we need approximately 4.3 million watts from an 8 foot dish or 43000 watts from an 80 foot dish and so on. Are you starting to see my point? The nearest star is 4.3 ly away, as I'm sure you know, needing 4.3 squared times as much power per square foot of antenna or 4.3 squared times as much antenna area on some combination thereof.
For a given total power, the transmitter size doesn't matter. Bigger transmitters just let you put more power into the signal, not less.
In that case, our responsibility is to spread life as far as we can, at least across the solar system. The authoritarian measures you propose will stand in the way of that. And in any case, why preserve a life not worth living? I'd rather we live unsustainably as men than sustainably as animals.
Life on Earth will continue until the Earth is destroyed. Earth has been hit by cosmic disasters before, and life has sprung back every time, different from what it was, but objectively no better or worse. Life takes care of itself. Our concern is human life, and we preserve that best by remaining free.
"Natural" is not "better". Disease, famine and predation are the enemies of mankind. In order for ecology to mean anything, it must mean striving for an environment that is suitable for human life. It was good environmental policy to eradicate smallpox. It was good environmental policy to eradicate dire wolves. It was good environmental policy to reduce the buffalo herds and devote the Great Plains of North American to food production.
What kind of quality life do you think you (well who knows you might be one of the very few lucky rich) would have when our population really starts to exceed the carrying capacity of the earth?
It can only be a problem if human ingenuity is held in check. Human population exploded in the 20th century, but the carrying capacity of the Earth more than kept pace with it. Famine and pestilence have never been as uncommon as today.
As long as we are permitted to discover and exploit new energy resources, to exploit the machinery of life to improve human health and food production, and to learn how to live well outside the surly bonds of Earth, mankind will not merely live long, but prosper.
Maybe we are it? Since many are so fond of "evidence" give us the "evidence" of other civilizations around other stars.
FTL travel would be great, but outside of science fiction I have not seen it.
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