4 ms·
True, but without radio transmissions, I bet we would spend decades arguing about whether it was actually an asteroid and a measurement anomaly. We can't really
by ohazi 7y ago
True, but without radio transmissions, I bet we would spend decades arguing about whether it was actually an asteroid and a measurement anomaly. We can't really distinguish a rock from a Battlestar at those distances without physically flying over to look.
- close04 7y agoAt this point we're relying almost exclusively on radio waves to detect any traces of intelligent life out there. So whether they're building moon stations in their neighborhood, or sending rockets here and there, we'd still look for their transmissions to identify their existence and to tell them apart from a random natural event. And while intelligent life may exist on a planet for millions of years, their window of actually emitting something into the void in a manner we can detect with our tech today [0] will probably be a lot shorter than that. This gives us a relatively tiny and limited visibility window into the history of life out there. Unless we manage to sync our window perfectly with theirs we'll never know they existed. [0] https://www.xkcd.com/638/ https://www.xkcd.com/638/
- K0SM0S 7y agoCompounded by the fact that advanced space communications would likely rely mostly on laser beams[1], whose efficiency and general design fits much better with that environment and its infrastructure. Unless pointing directly at your instrument (good luck, what are the odds?) and missed by the intended receiver, the beam will never reach you anyway. [1] Particularly if your operation is covert, discrete, observational, non-disruptive: you'd want to avoid signaling your presence in all directions, while wasting 99.99% of that energy away from your intended receiver. It's just military efficiency, a photon-VPN so to speak, that you'd need to "physically MitM" to hack.