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The Size of the Human Radio-Broadcast Bubble in the Milky Way Galaxy
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- yuvadam 16y agoThis kind of stuff always blows my mind away. How insignificant we all are, in the grand scheme of things. (Then my mind overflows when I ask myself the question of "what the hell is the universe?")
- jamesbressi 16y agoI can practically give myself an aneurism thinking the following when contemplating how it all began: Try and put religious arguments aside (while this will have some overtones) for a moment and work with me here and not throw the notion of time having no beginning or end which is equally frustrating to comprehend. Reverse the creation story and you wind up at the beginning with light and darkness. Before light there was darkness or nothing. But what was before the "darkness" or nothingness? The religious will say God whom has no beginning or no end, but how did God or energy pop into to existence if there was nothing? Then, put yourself in God or energy's place... You are in a "space" with nothing around you... everything is void... Then where did "you" come from? I know this is linear thought and time and the universe should not be considered in this way many in the field of science and mathematics explain... I understand the many dimensions that are possible and how time should be viewed, but it still doesn't answer the question of how something, anything came of nothing...
- markkat 16y agoA few years ago, I wrote a blog post about my thoughts on this, -two posts actually: http://corpusdord.blogspot.com/2006/02/existence-and-non-existence.html http://corpusdord.blogspot.com/2006/02/existence-and-non-exi... Basically, I was waxing on the idea of existence, and what it meant. Might be another angle for you to consider.
- jamesbressi 16y agoImpressive and I have contemplated such along similar lines before. Well done. Of course it doesn't bring an answer closer, but it is a very rational ideal based on everything we know to be true already. We'll have to have coffee and talk about this sometime if I'm ever in MI.
- markkat 16y ago>We'll have to have coffee and talk about this sometime if I'm ever in MI. Sure thing. Thanks. :)
- Retric 16y agoThat's a limited viewpoint. One idea is that time and space started with the big bang. So asking what happened before the big bang is somewhat pointless because causality did not exist. Things could happen without cause or consequence. PS: Our preconception of how reality operates break down on the vary large, the vary fast, and the vary small. Trying think how things operate without matter, energy, space, or time is something of a fool's errand IMO.
- makmanalp 16y agoCould you expand upon how causality can cease to exist or what would cause (heh heh) such a thing?
- mey 16y agoThere is the concept of the heat death of the universe. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe Essentially, as particles expand and spread out, the universe will reach a point where there is not enough energy localized in one area to support anything. Of course this is just one theory. etc etc
- angstrom 16y agoThe odd thing, the hardest thing to comprehend, is how our reality continues to exist. The ground state of the universe is a vacuum. Void of matter and shielded from radiation is the quantum foam of field fluctuations and virtual particles that exist on the scale of Planck lengths. The probable reality is not that the universe came from nothing, but that the universe is nothing. In a flat universe (which is what we believe we are) the symmetries of the universe cancel each other out such that, accounting for the mass and energy, the universe is a state where 0 = 0.
- panacea 16y ago"Then, put yourself in God or energy's place... You are in a "space" with nothing around you... everything is void... Then where did "you" come from?" There was no "space" with 'nothing around you'. Space is relative. Without time it isn't just a void... it doesn't exist.
- mortenjorck 16y agoEarth is a big fish in a small interstellar pond. But what a big fish it is! The sheer magnitude of order on our planet since the dawn of life - uncanny biodiversity, the rapturous elegance of cellular systems and organisms - and more recently, of our species - the culture, the technology, the spectacularity of both our achievements and failures - is anything but insignificant. Maybe this happens all the time elsewhere outside our 200-light-year dot. But even if it's common, I propose that it is significant wherever it happens. The universe is significant. And we're a part of it.
- panacea 16y ago"what the hell is the universe?" A mathematical structure? Perhaps a perspective/viewport/subset of the entirety of mathematical possibility? What's between nothing and 'something' (0 and 1)? Seems to me that's only a valid question if asked by a consciousness experiencing it (tree/woods/sound yada yada).
- robotomir 16y ago"...there is an ever-expanding bubble announcing Humanity’s presence to anyone listening in the Milky Way." This 200ly sphere does not equal detectable radio signals from Earth. SETI is looking for radio signals from the stars, yes, but they are looking for a focused and high-energy attempt from ETs to contact someone by beaming at specific stars. Radio "leaked" from regular transmissions typically does not carry a signal over interstellar distances.
- spiralganglion 16y agoThat's something I want to know. With the amount of energy given to our broadcasts, they surely would decay long before traveling any noteworthy distance. I'm curious as to what our most powerful broadcasts have been, and how far they'd travel before becoming unnoticeable. Especially, when compared to the amount of EMR released by neutron stars, pulsars, background noise, etcetera.
- robotomir 16y agoFrom the SETI FAQ: "Detection of broadband signals from Earth such as AM radio, FM radio, and television picture and sound would be extremely difficult even at a fraction of a light-year distant from the Sun. For example, a TV picture having 5 MHz of bandwidth and 5 MWatts of power could not be detected beyond the solar system even with a radio telescope with 100 times the sensitivity of the 305 meter diameter Arecibo telescope." Now, the Arecibo message should carry over a couple of hundred light years easily, but it was transmitted for three minutes only, and if you miss it, you miss it.
- Swizec 16y agoPale blue dot feels like an apt comparison --> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pale_Blue_Dot.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pale_Blue_Dot.png If you don't know yet, that's what earth looks like from just beyond Pluto's orbit. Also interesting to note in these discussions is the Hubble deep field image. These 3000-ish galaxies are covered by a quarter at arm's length when you look into the sky --> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HubbleDeepField.800px.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HubbleDeepField.800px.jpg We are indeed small and insignificant, but alone? Doubtful at best.
- spiralganglion 16y agoWhen looking at the radio bubble image, I immediately wondered if the blue color was chosen intentionally as a reference to the Pale Blue Dot. Great coincident association, at least. Similar sense of the infinitesimal scale we live our lives at. Now, let's see some Electron Microscopy.
- thegrossman 16y agoYeah, I chose the color for that reason. Also, it's hard to find a color that stands out on a the extreme light / dark background of a galaxy. It just so happens that pale blue is better than most.
- pbhjpbhj 16y ago>We are indeed small and insignificant, but alone? Doubtful at best. If we're the only (or even just one of few) intelligent beings (!) in the Universe then our significance is huge.
- Vivtek 16y agoIf we're the only intelligent beings in the Universe, then I argue that intelligence is overrated, thus our significance (except to ourselves) is negligible. Unless you go the route of arguing that without intelligence, there is no significance, and thus our self-significance is all the significance there is, in which case you're right - it's huge.
- VB6_Forever 16y agoCuriosity apart what good could it do us to discover or be discovered by aliens?
- spiralganglion 16y agoLet's find out!
- hydrazine 16y agoAll in the name of technology.. Assuming no ETs exist within our 200ly bubble, if ETs somehow discovered our signal and made contact, our level of knowledge would jump a few centuries at least.
- jerf 16y agoAfter substantial thought on the topic by various smart people, the answer seems to depend on the ultimate nature of physics and ultimately the ultimate end point of engineering. If leaving planets is engineering-impossible and we can't fling even small projectiles out of the Solar System at any reasonable fraction of lightspeed, then it's of primarily intellectual interest. If the Singularity is impossible and humans will remain recognizably human for the indefinite future but it's possible to travel between the stars enough to actually colonize things, eventual war of some sort seems pretty likely in most situations, though not necessarily to extinction (though not necessarily not!). If a Singularity is possible and looks something like Accelerando, the future of humanity may be an enormous set of entities of such incredible mutual alieness that meeting another set of such entities from another biological base may be of no particular note, locally exciting, globally ho-hum. I haven't expanded much on the thinking behind these, because I mean them merely as examples of my main point and if I go on too long about them it becomes very tempting to miss it in a flurry of nitpicking about the details of various scenarios. My actual point is that we don't really know what happens, because we don't know what those engineering limits will be. There are some scenarios where the universe naturally favors species getting along, and there are scenarios in which the universe naturally favors species attempting to extinguish each other with all possible speed.
- mechanical_fish 16y ago"Space... is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is." http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Hitchhikers_Guide_to_the_Galaxy http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Hitchhikers_Guide_to_the_Ga... And, really, this picture is just a fraction of a fraction of the down payment on the concept of big: This is merely an illustration of how big one galaxy is. There are eighty billion galaxies. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe --- [1] Tune in tomorrow for a new estimate, of course.
- arethuza 16y agoSagan was quoting 100 billion galaxies each of a 100 billion stars quite a while ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ex__M-OwSA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ex__M-OwSA [NB That nice round figure has stuck in my memory since I first saw Cosmos in the early 80s]
- hartror 16y agoI love Carl Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot" speech[1] as it not only places us in the universe but puts our silly futile arguments, battles and wars on the tiny stage they are actually fought. As an atheist I like to point to this video as one place I find moral context. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p86BPM1GV8M http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p86BPM1GV8M
- stralep 16y agoI mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
- AngryParsley 16y agoI find that reading huge numbers doesn't get the true scale across. It helps to bring the relative scale down to human terms. There are 63,360 inches in a mile. There are about 63,240 AUs in a light-year. So if the Earth was one inch from the Sun, Alpha Centauri would be 4 miles away. In this miniature model, the speed of light is around 7 inches per hour, or 1 mile per year, and our fastest probes take 100 days to move an inch. The galaxy sounds big at first, but only because our lives are so short. If we built Von Neumann probes we could take over the galaxy in a mere million years. That's nothing on a geologic time scale. The fact that the solar system has sat around for 4 billion years without being eaten by Von Neumann machines makes me pretty certain that we're alone.
- ecaron 16y agoAm I the only one that sits and thinks "wait, I can barely get my local AM station to come in clear enough to be understood - how could any signal possibly be distinguishable beyond 1 lightyear?"
- btipling 16y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line-of-sight_propagation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line-of-sight_propagation
- ANH 16y agoIn addition to line-of-sight, your AM station is transmitting more or less omnidirectionally. Significant gains (pun intended) can be had by narrowing your beam. Check out the Link Budget Equation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_budget http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_budget
- Udo 16y agoNo, and you're absolutely right, too. The human radiosphere might technically be 200 light years across, but that doesn't mean a meaningful amount of data could be extracted from it. Yes, we are putting out a steady hum of energy, but it's hardly announcing our presence. Were it not for high energy radar systems deployed on Earth, we could not even detect a civilization down here from any point in our own solar system, much less decipher any of the data being transferred. And as our civilization matures, the amount of energy radiated into space is actually shrinking. That said, 200 light years is an enormous size. Everything that is large enough to take up more than one pixel on the map of our galaxy if freaking huge! People may disagree about the factual relevance of the radio bubble, but it's still immensely cool that we managed to project something this big out there into the world. Looking at this beautiful image of the Milky Way and seeing the unstable little flicker centered on our humble home, I can't help but wonder how many other radiospheres are out there and when they might finally overlap with ours (if they haven't already).
- alexqgb 16y agoThat was my thought too. Given the size of the galaxy, the fact that we registered at all a view of the entire thing is, to my mind, astonishing. Go humans.
- meric 16y agoIs the milky way really large or is 200 years a really short time? Galileo was born only about 164000 days ( ~ 4 million hours ) ago. And that's already over twice as long as 200 years. It makes me sad when I think about how a life time is a mere thousand months.
- JonnieCache 16y agoTry this if you want to feel really small AND really big at the same time: http://htwins.net/scale/ http://htwins.net/scale/ WARNING: You may become nauseous, dizzy and afraid if you sit playing with this for too long.
- qjz 16y agoPretty neat. But no blue whale? That's a strange omission, since it's considered to be the largest animal ever to have existed on earth. Comparisons to our surroundings are interesting, but comparisons to our competitors are just as meaningful.
- ceejayoz 16y agoThe really amazing thing about that link is how much empty space we're made up of on an atomic and subatomic level.
- ars 16y agoOn a subatomic (and subnucleonic) scale it's 100% empty space. Fundamental particles are true point particles and no spatial extent has ever been found for them. So it's not just a lot of empty space - it's nothing except empty space.
- JonnieCache 16y agoAnd at the intergalactic level. The universe really is extraordinarily vacant for such an interesting place to live.
- Deestan 16y agoThe "Wrong Version" is hilarious: http://htwins.net/scale/wrong.html http://htwins.net/scale/wrong.html
- Sniffnoy 16y agoVery nice! Inclusion of preons is a bit questionable though.
- johnohara 16y agoThis makes me feel small, sad, and alone. One man's opinion. For me, I am grateful I live in a time when I can use a human invention to view images, taken by another human invention, of galaxies 13.5 billion light years away that probably no longer exist and be educated enough to sit down and calculate in terms of miles just how far those specks of light have traveled. Aristotle, Caesar, DaVinci, Newton, Kepler, Napoleon, Faraday and Einstein never saw what I have seen from my desktop. Sad? No. Privileged.
- 51Cards 16y agoI agree... but it also makes me yearn for what will be seen after I am gone. I constantly wish I could be frozen and woken up every 1000 years to see what else we have learned about the universe. The fact my glimpse into the cosmos is so fleeting does disappoint me.
- patrickod 16y agowhen we look at the improvements that we've made in the last 100 years it makes me very excited for even the foreseeable future, not even what might happen after that. We live in very interesting times indeed
- jasamer 16y agoPerhaps it's not necessary to freeze yourself - if Moore's law just ignores physical limitations and keeps going, we could have the technological singularity within our livetimes. It will get quite boring for people working in the computer science field after that ;-)
- Eliezer 16y agohttp://alcor.org/AboutCryonics/index.html http://alcor.org/AboutCryonics/index.html
- collypops 16y agoI've often thought the same. I've no yearning for an afterlife - I am more than willing to accept that once I'm dead, I'm gone. I also have no problem facing my own death - it'll happen when it happens. I certainly don't want to be immortal - that would be one of the most boring things ever, and would completely devalue my relationship with everyone I've met (especially loved ones). I can't however shake this desire to see where we are as a race in 200/2000/20,000 years. I guess all I can do is aim to at least contribute something towards the positive advancement of our race.
- evo_9 16y agoTo me this is really inspiring. I look at that and think 'Wow, our presence is already felt that far/wide and we've barely started to walk'. Incredible.
- teaspoon 16y agoEven more discouraging than the size of the bubble is what the bubble's cross-section looks like: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2004#comic http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2004#c...
- malkia 16y agoSome alien might think - hmmm.... Human Spam again :)
- iwwr 16y agoSpiced human ham would likely be incompatible with any alien metabolism.
- pohl 16y agoI'd like to see this plotted on two dimensions, where the horizontal axis is the year, starting when radio emissions began, and the vertical axis is the number of non-sol star systems that are within the bubble at that time. Binary or trinary systems would count as 1 system, not 2 or 3. This function would obviously be monotonically nondereasing. I wonder if wolfram alpha could rise to the challenge.
- spullara 16y agoUsing the NStED database of stars I find that there are 11,384 cataloged stars within a 200 light year bubble. I thought that it would probably follow an r^3 function but it appears that it follows something closer to an r^2 function - perhaps that is explained by the flatness of the galaxy or just noise? For example, within 20 light years there are only 77. Stars by Distance: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3924269/plot_10956.jpg http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3924269/plot_10956.jpg NStED: http://nsted.ipac.caltech.edu/ http://nsted.ipac.caltech.edu/
- pohl 16y agoThank you. 11k is higher than I would have guessed. I don't understand your graph. What is the RA axis?
- gjm11 16y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_ascension http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_ascension
- ars 16y agoYah, the galaxy is very flat. Depending on how you define the thickness (do you go by majority of stars, or include all outliers) proportionally the galaxy is flatter than a sheet of paper.
- AngryParsley 16y agoI don't think that's true. Other galaxies don't appear as thin or as flat as paper. (Examples: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap031008.html http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap031008.html http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap020703.html http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap020703.html http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap060612.html http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap060612.html) Typically they're about 100x wider than they are thick.
- pessimist 16y agoTo put the blue dot in perspective, its unimaginably beyond the scope of our current technology to travel that far. Pluto by comparison is 13 light-HOURS away and it takes about 10 years to get there. At that rate, it would take approximately 150000 YEARS to reach the same distance to reach the perimeter of that blue bubble. And blue bubble is almost insignificant in relation to our galaxy, which is one of about 100 billion galaxies!
- tow8ie 16y agoThis reminds me of the opening scene of “Contact” (1997), the movie adaptation of Carl Sagan’s novel by Robert Zemeckis: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGyq7d62oPQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGyq7d62oPQ
- rdamico 16y agoIt would be interesting to know how much of the Milky Way SETI has scanned so far. In other words, if someone else out there was running their own version of SETI, how long before they would be likely to find our little radio broadcast bubble?
- ck2 16y agoBut maybe, just maybe, our industrial and scientific development is producing an occasional side-effect of some kind of as yet-unknown faster-than-light wave which has made it much further out, and significantly more advanced civilizations have the ability to detect it. Sort of how an archaeologist can look at the surface of earth in a sat. photo and determine there was once human activity in a location based on ground disturbances, etc.
- jasamer 16y agoOf course, such a wave would be pretty bad news for a certain theory proposed by a certain Albert.
- athom 16y agoSure-fire way to feel small, sad, and alone: typekit.com Seriously, the page was completely empty until I unblocked that scripts on that and his main site.
- zoomzoom 16y ago"Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and more steadily we reflect on them; the starry heavens above and moral law within. . . The former view of a countless multitude of worlds annihilates, as it were, my importance as an animal creature, which must give back to the planet (a mere speck in the universe) the matter from which it came, the matter which is for a little time provided with vital force, we know not how. The latter on the contrary, infinitely raises my worth as that of an intelligence by my personality, in which the moral law reveals a life independent of all animality and even of the whole world of sense--at least so far as it may be inferred from the purposive destination assigned to my existence by this law, a destination which is not restricted to the conditions and limits of this life but reaches into the infinite." (Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 1788)
- derleth 16y agoHa. So, we don't even rate a single pixel on the blank, white screen that is the Universe? Sounds about right.
- iwwr 16y agoSadly, it would not be possible to discern manmade radio transmissions from further than a few light-days/weeks. Also, as communication capacities increase, more and more of that is moving into cables and not radio transmitters. High-power Earth-Satellite and Earth-Earth transmitters are being replaced with low-power point-to-point wireless links. The power of radio traffic leaking off the Earth is not growing very much, if at all.
- aufreak3 16y agoCool! .. and all this discussion reminds of a line from Calvin and Hobbes - "Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us."
- dhughes 16y agoIt's odd how you look at that and go "hunh" but then realize, wait a minute who took the picture of the Milky Way Galaxy? It's a graphic of course but still you forget what you're looking at and how far away and how big it is.
- Jach 16y agoOh, it's a blog entry! There really should be a noscript warning, I thought it was something like http://www.phrenopolis.com/perspective/atom/ http://www.phrenopolis.com/perspective/atom/ at first.
- ogrisel 16y agoYou should cheer up that we are living in the Slow Zone. That should make us unaffected by the "Straumli Perversion" and other Powers from the Transcend and messing with the Beyond for quite some time.
- jaekwon 16y agoThis makes me more hopeful of getting a response from other beings. Perhaps we're not so alone after all. Relax, it's PhysEx.
- gaius 16y agoUgh, what is that horrible font? Whatever typekit.com is trying to do (in Firefox 3.6 on Windows 7) isn't very working...