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Even if tons of intelligent civilizations happened to be radiating gravitational waves (or some other form of radiation which travels at or very close to the sp
by meowface 8y ago
Even if tons of intelligent civilizations happened to be radiating gravitational waves (or some other form of radiation which travels at or very close to the speed of light) encoded with information directly towards Earth right now, it's very likely we'd never receive them in the next million years due to the vastness of the universe.
- roywiggins 8y agoWhat about all of the intelligent civilizations who were doing it a million years ago? With a million years for waves to fill space, you'd think we'd be able to hear something.
- LoSboccacc 8y agoNot necessarily, immagine scanning all radio frequencies except you don’t know neither modulation nor the symbols transmitted. Separating something from noise is a challenge on itself especially if signals are compressed or encrypted
- meowface 8y agoMaybe. Or maybe the time range of broadcasts that reached our solar system was several millions or even billions years ago. Or maybe it was as recent as 10,000 years ago, but we had no way of detecting or decoding them. Or maybe nearly all of the intelligent life existent in the universe doesn't yet have the capability to transmit information via gravitational waves or other resilient media. Or maybe humans really are one of the first instances of intelligent life in the universe, and the broadcasts won't start coming until millions of years from now... or never. And the most disappointing/intriguing part is there's a good chance humanity will never, ever know the answers and will never have any confirmation or denial of any of those possibilities. Or if they do, it might be so far into the future that humanity as a concept will cease to exist. The universe is just too big.