3 ms·
I think people, for both good and bad faith reasons, vastly underestimate how unlikely it would be for any sort of artificial signal to reach us. It would need
by nimish 2y ago
I think people, for both good and bad faith reasons, vastly underestimate how unlikely it would be for any sort of artificial signal to reach us.
It would need to be so powerful and so precisely aimed at us that firing randomly into the void would be pointless. We can barely detect the most energetic events in the universe like quasars and gamma ray bursts as it is.
And that assumes we could even decode it -- advanced coding uses scrambling techniques that deliberately make the signal look like noise to the uninformed receiver...
- exe34 2y agopresumably nowadays we would only aim at stars with a planet with an atmosphere we might at least suspect to be influenced by biology (i.e. contains some gas that couldn't be formed and maintained by known geological processes). so maybe aliens would see oxygen in our atmosphere and aim at us - but you'd still have to get the timing right: we might have been burning witches the last time one message came by and next time we might be in the midst of some other social disturbance.